8199880 submission

An anonymous reader writes: As researchers work on creating a "Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea" (which is discussed in a recent New York Times article and Nature paper, there is the suggestion that there may be hundreds of millions of species of microbes on the planet (see NY Times article). If true that would mean that (1) there is much greater diversity in microbes than in anything else and (2) we know basically nothing about the diversity of life on the planet since only about 10,000 or so microbial species have been formally described.

