what term refers to a distinct type of living thing
Life Since its primordial beginnings, life on Earth has changed its environment on a geologic time scale. To survive in most ecosystems, life must often adapt to a wide range of conditions. Some microorganisms, called extremophiles, thrive in physically or geochemically extreme environments that are detrimental to most other life on Earth. Aristotle was the first person to classify organisms. Later, Carl Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature for the classification of species. Eventually new groups and categories of life were discovered, such as cells and microorganisms, forcing dramatic revisions of the structure of relationships between living organisms. The cell is considered the structural and functional unit of life.[8] There are two kinds of cells, prokaryotic and eukaryotic, both of which consist of cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane and contain many biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. Cells reproduce through a process of cell division, in which the parent cell divides into two or more daughter cells.
Bacterial taxonomy In the scientific classification established by Carl Linnaeus,[1] each species has to be assigned to a genus (binary nomenclature), which in turn is a lower level of a hierarchy of ranks (family, suborder, order, subclass, class, division/phyla, kingdom and domain). In the currently accepted classification of life, there are three domains (Eukaryotes, Bacteria and Archaea),[2] which, in terms of taxonomy, despite following the same principles have several different conventions between them and between their subdivisions as are studied by different disciplines (botany, zoology, mycology and microbiology), for example in zoology there are type specimens, whereas in microbiology there are type strains.