Most life on Earth is microbes. we've only just scratched the surface of the microbial realm. Probably less than .1% of microbes have been classified let alone cultured or had their genes sequenced, so really that microbial realm is a mystery.
About 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before.
Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.
Of course there are depressing periods when nothing appears to be happening. But whenever anything was happening, and even when nothing was happening, it was fun just to do phage experiments.
In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.
The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene, and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in an amazing number of species of bacteria. It was a huge moment of realization.
I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play...but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of.
In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only 'intended' to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things.
