Biopolymers and cell. 2008; 24 (5): 412 - 421

Microcosm of living: evidence of nonobviousness

V. A. Kordium, E. V. Moshynets, M. V. Tsapenko, N. I. Adamchuk-Chalaya, D. M. Irodov, V. I. Andrienko, S. P. Shpilevaya

In current biology there is a pronounced asymmetry in our knowledge of life. All essential results in molecular biology, molecular genetics, and biochemistry are accomplished on rather limited model objects. Thus, a general concept of life is based on these few results, and this inadequate understanding of life has been extrapolated to the whole Biosphere. Such approach is reasonable for eukaryotes due to their fundamental universality in genome organization. However, for prokaryotes, which are mainly uncultivable and hardly accessible in their natural substrata even for direct observation, such approach is unjustified. The concept of a potentially universal method for studying micro-world in natural substrata is formulated in the article, the results of method application are shown.

Keywords: micro-community, uncultivable forms, unusual forms, nondestructive method.