DIP a bucket into the ocean and you are catching a sample of the “primordial sea” from which all complex life on Earth evolved. It turns out that there are hundreds of times more species of microbes in the oceans than we thought.
Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts collected water samples from sites in the Atlantic Ocean and hydrothermal vents around a Pacific volcano, and used a new technique known as 454-tag sequencing to identify organisms from small snippets of DNA.
Most microbes were from a small number of known species, but in…
