Nanoarchaeum
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Nanoarchaeum equitans is a species of tiny microbe, discovered in 2002 in a hot vent off the coast of Iceland by Karl Stetter. It appears to be an obligatory symbiont on the archaeon Ignicoccus. Its cells are only 400 nm in diameter and its genome only 480,000 nucleotides long; as of 2005 it remains the smallest known genome size, not including viruses. Genetically, Nanoarchaeum is sufficiently peculiar in that its 16S rDNA sequence is undetectable by the most common methods. It has been given its own phylum, called Nanoarchaeota, which is somewhat tentatively placed among the Archaea.
References
- (This paper represents the first discovery of Nanoarchaeum.) H. Huber, et al. (2002) "A new phylum of Archaea represented by a nanosized hyperthermophilic symbiont", Nature, 417: 63-7. PubMed entry: [1] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=11986665&query_hl=3)
- (This paper describes the genome sequence of Nanoarchaeum.) E. Waters, et al. (2003) "The genome of Nanoarchaeum equitans: insights into early archaeal evolution and derived parasitism", PNAS, 100: 12984-8. PubMed entry: [2] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=14566062&query_hl=3)
- (Recent work suggesting that Nanoarchaeum is not a new phylum of archaea, but is a type of euryarchaeon.) C. Brochier, et al. (2005) "Nanoarchaea: representatives of a novel archaeal phylum or a fast-evolving euryarchaeal lineage related to Thermococcales?", Genome Biology, 6:R42. PubMed entry: [3] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15892870&query_hl=3)de:Nanoarchaeum equitans