Freiburg to Vienna—Looking at Cyanobacteria Over The Twenty-Five Years

Abstract

In following an invitation to present an overview of the last twenty-five years of cyanobacteriological research it will come as no surprise that my first response will be some kind of general disclaimer with respect to synoptic balance or indeed total accuracy of what follows. The best that one can hope for is a personal, hopefully dispassionate, version of some of the developments and constraints that have happened in our own field during what has surely been a second golden age of biology, coming more or less a century after the first. I will advance an argument that, separate from the revolution of molecular biology that has pervaded virtually the whole of biology, there have been two themes of particular importance which have changed the way in which we look at cyanobacteria and indeed many other bacteria. Firstly there ha been a tighter integration between the understanding of biochemistry and ecology. The role of the organism in its natural environment and the ways in which it interacts with other microbes increasingly forms the background in which laboratory experiments are designed. This has consequences with regard to the use and value of “type species” and this will be alluded to further. More importantly, there has been the emergence of the need to understand the evolutionary significance of our knowledge of bacteria. This has arisen directly from the triumph of molecular phylogeny, which has provided for the first time a coherent measure of relatedness. Dobzhansky’s well known dictum about understanding biology must now be applied to microorganisms and is perhaps particularly appropriate to cyanobacteria.