A DEEPLY BRANCHED NOVEL PHYLOTYPE FOUND IN PADDY SOIL

In the course of flora analysis of soil Archaea, we found very strange 16S rDNA clones, which could possibly constitute a sister clade from known two archael, Crenarchaeota and Euryarchaeota, lineages. Overall signature sequences showed that the clones were closely related to domains Archaea and Eucarya. However, at least nine nucleotides distinguished the novel clones from domains Archaea and Eucarya. Phylogenetic trees drawn by maximum parsimony, neighbor joining and maximum likelihood methods also showed unique phylogenetic position of the clones. A very specific primer set was synthesized to detect the presence of the novel group of organisms in terrestrial environments. A specific DNA fragment was amplified from all of paddy soil DNAs, and this fact suggests that the novel organisms inhabit paddy soils.