The Surprising Archaea: Discovering Another Domain of Life

This book contains everything anyone not actually working in the field need to know about the new domain. It describes what the arcaea are like, how they were discovered, a little about the technology used to study them and it goes further: It discusses the implications for the study of the origin of life. A very readable book. However, it is already a few years old, which quickly becomes a problem in such a new and rapidly developing field. Maybe soon time for a revised edition?

Just what he was looking for.

I Loved it. A lot of information about the Archaea world.

In his unusually thorough, non specialist, treatment of anaerobicextremeophiles (non-oxygen using bacteria that live in weird places), the author answers some interesting questions, such as what kind of biologic adaptions does it take to live in places like boiling water or acid lakes? How do you collect samples of them? How do you culture creatures that die in the presense of oxygen? Is it possible that there's an entire biosphere far below ground?Oddly, the one explanation he leaves out why the archea are generally only found today in hostile places.

In this slim volume Howland (Bowdoin College, Maine) introduces readers to a domain of organisms, and their biological life-style, that have only become moderately understood within the last 30 years. As such, it is a modest success, and the information it contains is useful. However, there are some shortcomings, including redundancies and organizational difficulties that detract from the overall value of the book, making it difficult to recommend, except for the fact that there are no other books in this category. Students, undergraduate as well as graduate, need to learn about these organisms. Undergraduate students particularly would be well advised to read the section on obtaining energy, since the concepts covered there will be useful in many other contexts. Given that need, which this book adequately addresses, it seems that this volume should be added to the research library. Hopefully, future editions or future authors will cover this interesting material in a more coherent and organized manner. (This is excerpted from my review in Choice, the review journal of the American Library Association.)

As usual, life is much more bizarre and weird than you thought and this book shows you exactly why. I found the discussion on archaeal and bacterial metabolism particularly interesting. These little archaea are pretty damn sweet. Makes me wish I had taken microbiology in college instead of sleeping in all the time.

"Animal, vegetable or mineral?" It seems that question leaves out almost all living things. Biologically, the plants, animals---even yeast---are closer to one another than to any bacterium. The difference is that the former---the Eukarya---have cells with nuclei, while the Bacteria do not. Genetically, there is a third domain of life---the Archaea. A member of the Archaea is as different, genetically, from a member of either of the other domains as a bacterium is from you. The tree of life has THREE genetic branches. The remarkable discovery of the third domain of life had to await the development of modern methods of genetic analysis; the definitive paper (by Carl Woese and colleagues from the University of Illinois) appeared in 1977. Howland has written a lucid and highly entertaining overview of the biology of the Archaea, coveing everything from their ecology to the structure of archaeal cells. The level of sophistication expected of the reader is about the same as would be needed to enjoy a Scientific American article.

A great survey of the current state of knowledge about thisintriguing group of organisms. The writing is clear andinformative. Howland describes a fewclassic examples of the group in detail and gives a goodpicture of the entire kingdom and its place in evolutionaryhistory.Throughout the book he does a wonderful job of explaining howresearchers arrived at their conclusions and how muchfaith the reader should have in the theories heputs forward.

good reading. I am not a biologist and I like it