Title: Making the Case Against Archaea | Scienceline
Headings: Making the Case Against Archaea
Making the Case Against Archaea
Disease hunters target an ancient form of life.
Robert Goodier • January 2, 2009
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Content: He worked alongside Carl Woese as the concept of three domains of life gained momentum. Archaea, Wolfe believes, are too primitive and biologically isolated to cause disease in animals, though he does not discount the idea of the consortium effect. “I would say it’s a dead end, but in science you can never tell,” he said. He does agree with Thomas on one point, though: studying archaea is tough, and was harder still when he started his work without the benefit of the technology available today. The old technique, he said, was to swab an abscess, for example, and breed the extracted microbes on agar – a seaweed gelatin that nourishes them. Outside of the body in oxygen-rich open air, only those bacteria that survive in oxygen multiplied. The methanogens and other anaerobes vulnerable to oxygen, if there were any, were smothered. “So,” Wolfe conceded, “unless a laboratory takes a lot of caution to separate anaerobes from the sample then they could be missing something.” Thomas insists that archaea need to be studied further before they can be eliminated as suspects in causing unsolved diseases.