Bacteria go extinct at substantial rates, although appear to avoid the mass extinctions that have hit larger forms of life on Earth, according to new research from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Caltech, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The finding contradicts widely held scientific thinking that microbe taxa, because of their very large populations, rarely die off. The study, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, used massive DNA sequencing and big data analysis to create the first evolutionary tree encompassing a large fraction of Earth’s bacteria over the past billion years. Researchers estimate between 1.4 and 1.9 million bacterial lineages exist on Earth today. They were also able to determine how that number has changed over the last billion years — with 45,000 to 95,000 extinctions in the last million years alone.
— source University of British Columbia | Jul 30, 2018