Imagenes de carl woese obituary

University of Illinois microbiology and Institute for Genomic Biology professor Carl R. Woese, who adopted a molecular approach to classifying organisms and upended taxonomy with the discovery of a "third domain" of life, died Sunday (Dec.

30) at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 84.

Woese and his colleagues wrote two papers published in 1977 that overturned a universally held assumption about the basic structure of the tree of life.

Imagenes de carl woese obituary

They reported that the microbes now known as archaea (are-KEY-uh) were as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals are. Prior to this finding, scientists had lumped archaea together with bacteria, and asserted that the tree of life had two main branches - the bacteria (which they called prokarya), and everything else (the eukarya).

The new discovery added archaea as a third main branch of the evolutionary family tree.

The discovery stemmed from Woese's painstaking analysis of the ribosome, a protein-building machine abundant