individual groups making up the animal kingdom, large ensembles named ‘phyla’, are fairly easy to recognize but the evolutionary relationships between the phyla have been very difficult to establish; the phyla were first described in the 19th century, and have been refined since, on the basis of a shared ‘body plan’ within each phylum. That is, all species belonging to a given phylum share a se...

BACKGROUND Estuaries are among the most productive habitats on the planet. Bacteria in estuary sediments control the turnover of organic carbon and the cycling of nitrogen and sulfur. These communities are complex and primarily made up of uncultured lineages, thus little is known about how ecological and metabolic processes are partitioned in sediments. RESULTS De novo assembly and binning re...

A revised six-kingdom system of life is presented, down to the level of infraphylum. As in my 1983 system Bacteria are treated as a single kingdom, and eukaryotes are divided into only five kingdoms: Protozoa, Animalia, Fungi, Plantae and Chromista. Intermediate high level categories (superkingdom, subkingdom, branch, infrakingdom, superphylum, subphylum and infraphylum) are extensively used to...