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I think LuketheDuke's answer is an oversimplification of the biological species concept (possibly resulting from the dictionary having a poor definition). The definition he gives is one of many which are in current use, and is made redundant by many types of organism. It is important to recognise that because reproduction is not the same process in all ...

That whole thing of being more complex is non-sense, you can't say that for animals and you can't say that for plants either. It all depends on how you look at it. Average number of cells? Size of genome? Size of the proteome? Adaptability to different environments? Mental abilities? You can't place human on the top of any of them (maybe we could argue about ...

Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis first shows up in pubmed in Gänzle et al. (1998). They reference Trüper and De'Clari (1997) for the name Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. The latter say: As none of them makes sense in the nominative apposition construction, we hereby correct these names to forms that are in agreement with Rule 12c as follows. ... ...

The branch of science you are looking for is taxonomy, that is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. Modern taxonomy was born from the studies of the Swedish zoologist Carl Linnæus (1707-1778), who first introduced, in his books Systema Naturae (Systems of Nature) and Species Plantarum (Plants Species) the ...

The Tree of Life project has a browse-able tree of all major taxa, but not necessarily all species. You can start at the root of the tree here. Tree of life uses modern phylogenetic nomenclature rather than more traditional Kingdom-Phylum-Class-etc. Part of the problem that you will run into is that common names differ across regions/countries/languages. ...

Interfamilial hybrids have never, to my knowledge, been recorded occurring naturally (without human intervention). In plants, somatic inter-familial hybrids have been produced for a wide variety of species pairs in the lab (e.g. between carrot and barley; Kisaka et al. 1997). In animals, there are some historical reports of hybrids between chickens ...

Background There are basically three highest taxonomic levels: bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. Many sources distinguish only prokaryotes and eukaryotes, subdividing prokaryotes into bacteria and archaea. Other sources posit archaea as a third domain on the highest level. That's a long debate though and fortunately not the topic here. By appearance, the ...

The reason that Archaea were determined to be a separate (and only the third) kingdom so late (1977 according to this reference) was because archaea often completely resemble eubacteria. They are unicellular and have no organelles and appropriately they were grouped with other prokaryotes because of their morphology and cellular physiology. But by the ...

Animals and plants are both classified as Eukaryotes, and as such can form large, complex, multi-cellular organisms. There are several major differences at the cellular level that distinguish the 2 Kingdoms (Animalia and Plantae). Without getting technical, the most crucial difference in relation to your question is that plants contain chlorophyll, and as ...

The term you are looking for is psychrophile or cryophile. There are examples of microbes adapted to very cold conditions in Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. There are also fairly complex animals capable of surviving very low temperatures - Tardigrades, for example. There are multiple issues that organisms face in withstanding extremely low temperatures - ...

I went to the Yeastbank website at Weihenstephan for some info. The keyword here is "Stamm," which is German for stem, clade, clan, or strain. So, I would take this to mean that the 34/70 is an isolate (#70) of strain 34. Two of 34/70's strengths, according to the link above are it makes clean beer and gives a pleasant taste profile due to its low yeast-like ...

When it comes to plants and animals, common names clearly differ from region to region. A first effort to univocally classify them was done in the 16th century by Carl Linnæus (see my answer to this question for some historical background). The nomenclature of plants is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), ...

I don't have a definitive answer, but I suspect Hymenoptera is "just a name," albeit a name that has lasted through the phylogenetic nomenclature revolution. Hymenoptera was erected by Linnaeus in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae (1758). The description of Hymenoptera (membrane wing; p. 553 [hope your Latin is better than mine]) follows that of ...

You are correct that the reason is similar to that of convergent evolution of the eye. Both snakes and legless lizards are lizards (Squamata) that have lost their legs. However they have done so entirely separately much as octopus and human eyes have evolved entirely separately. An easier analogy is between whales and sea cows. Both are legless mammals but ...

Nico provides a nice answer, but implies that the names are more fluid than they actually are. It is possible to get an current standard nomenclature, and to update it each time the ICN releases a new edition. The ICN requires that any changes be made by an international botanical congress, and changes are included when a new addition of the ICN is ...

This question highlights the different species concepts. If you go by the reproductive species concept (a population of actually or potentially interbreeding organisms), then yes. Apparently, the populations were interbreeding. If you go by the typological species concept (morphologically distinct), then no. Homo neandertalensis and the "Denosovian" are ...

If I understand John S. Wilkins' magnificent book on the history of the "species" concept correctly, the basis of biological taxonomy can be traced back to the Aristotelian idea of per genus et differentiam: you can define something as consisting of a general type ("a plant") with a difference ("made of wood") to define an entity ("a tree"), which could then ...

Let me clarify my answer since it is lower quality than people may like. To answer the question, my friend is a horticulist and has given a more detailed answer. Subspecies is the most generic, taxonomically-defined term one rank order lower than species. The subspecies (either an individual subspecies, or collective group of subspecies) are defined to be ...

How are such species are defined, and at what point dogs stop being dogs anymore? This is a bit like the is-Pluto-a-planet-discussion. A group of scientists have to come together and hold a big conference. You have a few principles that you want to adhere to and then it's big groups of people making decisions.

I am not sure why you say there is no information... a quick Google search returned a few interesting pages... In this paper: Progress in Metabolic Engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae - Nevoigt, Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 2008 the author says: The identification of the entire genomic sequence of a commonly used lager brewer's yeast strain, i.e., ...

Kingdoms The UK accepted system has five kingdoms, for some it's hard to describe a single word common name so I hope you don't mind that I have written brief summaries too: Animalia are multi-cellular organisms that have adaptations to allow them to move within their environment. They have membrane bound organelle but not cell walls or chloroplasts. ...

EOL has large collections of common names, and a pretty comprehensive API which should be able to access them somehow (I haven't tried specifically downloading commons name before, though, so I can't promise that it'd work). If you need a list locally, ITIS has downloadable pipe-delimited files containing scientific names and common names (although you'd ...

There are many definitions of a species, which may or may not include the concept of reproductive barrier. The Biological Species Concept (BSC) is quite popular and involves a reproductive barrier, but other concepts such as the Phylogenetic Species Concept do not include a reproductive barrier. Disagreements and confusion also happen over just what the ...

The story of the ability to interbreed is even more complicated than the ambiguity posed by horses, donkeys, lions and tigers. In California and Mexico, there are a series of species of lizards which form a geographical 'horseshoe'. Neighboring lizards can interbreed, but species at either end of the horseshoe cannot breed. In other words, lizards at the ...

Slow worms share many characteristics with other lizards, such as the presence of eyelids, which no snake has. Leglessness in slow worms evolved separately than in snakes, as can be seen by the fact that other lizards in the same family, Anguidae (and therefore, more closely related to them than snakes) possess legs (see Gerrohonotus and Abronia). Things ...

Plants are multicellular organisms that utilize diffuse inorganic molecules (CO2, NO3, etc...) for energy and growth and thus they have evolved anatomical features that maximize the efficient concentration of these molecules (i. e., the root - shoot). Animals are multicellular organisms that utilize concentrations of organic molecules for energy and growth ...

Indeed this is a bit of interesting history. Linnaeus was not a modest man, but he was also a prodigious contributor to biology. He made many editions of his two major works Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae published in 1759. Systema Naturae covered both plants and animals and had 12 editions, eventually with 3 volumes in several parts. ...

I had a quick look in my books (for the British Isles and Europe) but although I found a couple of candidates I don't feel confident in either identification. I suggest that you have a look at Roger Phillips' online identification guide - this will suggest a few identification criteria that you haven't considered in your question.

The biological definition of a species on Dictionary.com is as follows; The major subdivision of a genus or subgenus, regarded as the basic category of biological classification, composed of related individuals that resemble one another, are able to breed among themselves, but are not able to breed with members of another species. So what we take from ...

Well, I wasn't able to find an online video course. The closest I came was this site, which links to courses that put their material online. Most of these are compilations of the lecture notes. There's also this page from the University of British Columbia, that has a nice little overview of the field of plant taxonomy. In my experience, botany and plant ...