Did researchers find a new branch on the tree of life in Lake Vostok?

A slew of press reports have trumpeted the finding of a new strain of bacteria recovered from Lake Vostok. Vostok is located in Antarctica, where the liquid water is buried under several kilometers of ice that have kept it isolated from the outside environment for millions of years. After several years of efforts and a pause to work out decontamination procedures, a Russian team drilled down to the lake water for the first time last year.

The hope was that, like several other under-ice ecosystems (most notably the one that creates Blood Falls), Vostok would host a community of bacteria that scrapes out a living through some combination of residual organic material and energy provided by geological processes. According to the press accounts, that hope seems to have been borne out.

But what sort of life are we looking at? Almost all of the accounts trace back to a RIA Novosti account that has very little in the way of details. The Russian researchers have apparently sequenced some DNA from the organism; although they don't specify which DNA, chances are good that it's the gene for ribosomal RNA, which is very useful for placing the organism within the tree of life. The differences with known species of bacteria indicate that it's clearly a new species, and the initial analysis suggests that it doesn't even group neatly with any of the major categories of bacterial life we're aware of.