Oceans of Crenarchaeota: a Personal History Describing This Paradigm Shift: Studies of marine archaea during the past two decades unveil the distinctive biology of these diverse and abundant microorganisms
The notion that Archaea are abundant in most natural habitats, especially the oceans, marks a fundamental sea change from a generation ago, one that met considerable resistance at first. The seeds of the idea trace to 1977, when Carl Woese at the University of Illinois and George Fox, now at the University of Houston, proposed, on the basis of painstakingly analyzed ribosomal RNA (rRNA) oligonucleotide sequences, that life stems from “three aboriginal lines of descent.” Their findings are considered among the most important in modern biology.