The Monera
are a biological
kingdom, including all living things which have a prokaryotic
cell organization. Prior to its creation these were treated
as two separate divisions of plants: the Schizomycetes or bacteria,
including most prokaryotes and considered as fungi, and the
Cyanophyta or blue-green algae. The latter are now considered
a group of bacteria, typically called the cyanobacteria.
Recently DNA and RNA sequence analysis has demonstrated that
there are actually two major groups of prokaryotes, the Bacteria
and Archaea,
which do not appear to be closer in relationship to each other
than they are to the eukaryotes.
These may be treated as subkingdoms, but most new schemes tend
to abandon the Monera and treat these as separate domains or
kingdoms.
