Genome sequencing of Methanococcus jannaschii, at the Institute for
Genomic Research (TIGR) in
Gaithersburg, Maryland, US, has
confirmed that this ancient-Iooking
microorganism is not really a bacterium, but belongs to the phylogenetic family, Archaea (Science, VoI 271, No 5252).
Methanococcus jannaschii lives
near hot sea vents in temperatures
close to boiling point and replicates
using only inorganic compounds.
The TIGR team-Ieader Carol Bult
said that they had decoded 1.7 million base pairs before reaching the
conclusion that a large majority of
the genes had no equivalent in other
known organisms.
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