Archaea and the Meaning of Life

Join Thorsten Allers at the Bread and Bitter for a SciBar talk all about ‘Archaea and the Meaning of Life’.

Every living thing on this planet belongs to one of three branches on the tree of life. Bacteria make up one branch, while animals, plants and fungi together make up another. But the third domain of life wasn’t even discovered until the 1970s. This mysterious group of micro-organisms, the Archaea, remain one of the biggest puzzles in microbiology. They have been discovered in some of the most hostile environments on the planet, in conditions that would kill other forms of life. Even more strangely, we have yet to find a single species of Archaea that causes disease.