Names, New and Strange – A Snippet

by Elio
 

Are you baffled by the advent of so many new species of bacteria, most carrying unusual names? Let me throw a few at you: Adlercreutzia equolifaciens subsp. celatus, Bacillus velezensis, Butti­auxella agrestis, Cupriavidus basilensis, Curtobacterium, Hypomesus nipponensis, Neisseria mu­cosa, Rhodococcus qingshengii, Streptomyces cavourensis, Variovorax paradoxus.
 

Figure 1. Microbiology Resource Announ­ce­ments website. Source. Frontispiece: What's in a name? William Shakespeare. Source

To start with, you may ask: where on Earth did I find them? Let me assure you that I didn't run into them them by searching the literature. Like you, I have better things to do with my time. Instead, I encountered them when scanning the table of contents of the ASM publication Microbiology Resources Announcements. The above list of bacteria comes from the current issue of that journal.
 

The intent of said publication is not to provide its readers with collections of novel species names. Au contraire, it is the repository of articles that announce – among other things – the availability of metagenome sequences, am­plicon collections, and metabolomic data of prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbes and viruses. But in so doing, it must list the organisms involved, thus revealing their names, old or new. In addition, each entry carries a brief introductory paragraph that gives you at least an idea of the properties of the organism. For example, it says that:

Adlercreutzia equolifaciens subsp. celatus DSM 18785 was isolated from the cecal contents of a rat and is an obligately anaerobic equol-producing bacterium. Here, we report the finished and annotated genome sequence of this organism, which has a genome size of 2,929,991 bp and a G+C content of 63.2%.
 

Well, this may be a case of unintended consequences, but it may turn out to be a useful one.
 

 

Addendum, Category 'Strange Names'

by Janie and Christoph
 

When it comes to 'strange names' for bacteria − and there are quite a few, see above − Chambers et al. did a particularly good job late last year.
 

Figure 2. What's longer: the train you've just hopped off, or the sign at the station telling you where you've ar­rived? Source

The December 2020 issue of Genome Biology and Evo­lu­tion contains a paper bearing the unbearably strange ti­tle "Comparative Genomics and Pan-Genomics of the My­xococcaceae, including a Description of Five Novel Spe­cies: Myxococcus eversor sp. nov., My­xo­coccus @#­$%&!  sp. nov., Myxococcus vastator sp. nov., Pyxidi­coc­cus ca­erfyrddinensis sp. nov., and Pyxidi­coc­cus trucida­tor sp. nov." A part of their description of the new spe­cies, My­xo­coccus @#$%&!  sp. nov. is quoted below. Please note that the species name is taken from the site of isolation of the type strain:
 

... DNA GC content is 68.7 mol%. The draft genome sequence of AM401^T is available from GenBank (accession VIFM01). The type strain (AM401^T = NBRC 114351^T = NBBC 100770^T) was isolated from soil collected in the parish of @#$%&, UK (gridref 53.22°N 4.19°W).
 

You may wonder about the species name in "Myxococcus @#$%&! " as you will seldom find graw­lixes (encrypted profanity) in our posts. But no profanity is intended. Here we use @#$%&!, not to hide a curse or a swear, but simply as a placeholder – or call it compression – for the full species name:

Myxococcus  llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis

Who said microbiologists don't have a sense of humor? In Monty Python style, Chambers et al. could not re­sist bringing My­xo­coccus  @#$%&! right back into the literature, in a corrigendum of April this year because "...the acronyms of the culture collections to which the type strains were deposited contained typographic errors."