Question

Hiya, my first question in a while !

So, I'm going through my lessons, and I've noticed I'm lacking the basic genera of the Endobateracea class, and I can't seem to find much through Google...

I was wondering if anyone could help ? I know there are about 3 major ones, and one of them is Yersinia, if i remember correctly...

Answer 1

The taxonomy and phylogenetics of bacteria change so rapidly that I cannot recall if it is even used. However, you may be having problems because 1) it is not a class but family and 2) you spelled it wrong. It is "Enterobacteriaceae". That should help quite a bit. Also, if you look up the genus Yersinia on Wikipedia, the right side of the entry will have a list of taxonomic ranks and you can click on the family "Enterobacteriaceae" for more info.

Answer 2

Oh, ok.
I knew there was something fishy about how I was spelling it...
It's a shame there aren't any scientists working on an actual classification (but I guess the constant gene-swapping between bacteria makes that quite a challenge !).

Thanks for your help.

Peter.

Answer 3

@pbock They largely have admitted that dealing with relationships among bacteria is incredibly hard and perhaps too fluid. They have gone to a candidate species as a formal description due to the high number of bacteria that we can detect via DNA but cannot find a way to get them to grow. We have pursued a similar thing for Fungi due to the same problem. We had a somewhat controversial paper on it.

Answer 4

Yep, our teacher's told us we'll be going with a 19-20th century Bergey's classification for how to identify the bacteria... Sad thing is, I think my Microbio teacher wants us to memorize a select list of genera he's hand picked, for the exams ! (Like Salmonella, Escherichia and Yersinia for Enterobacteriaceae... And yes, After you answered me, I figured out the start of the name was the genera XD ).

Luckily, we'll be getting a lot of practice at identifying bacteria in the lab !

Answer 5

could you provide a link to the paper, if it's available, perhaps?

I'm still trying to sharpen my paper-deciphering skills :)
Though I think I'm of the select few students who actually try to read the scientific literature without being asked to :).

Answer 6

@pbock I'll send you a PM with the link when I find one that works. Basically the paper deals with the rapid increase in sequences submitted to GenBank (a depository for DNA, RNA, and protein sequences maintained by the USA gov't) and how many of the sequences cannot be matched with a currently described species, and that the rate of sequence submission outpaces the description of new species to the point that the requirements of having to have the physical specimen mean it would take thousands of years to name the fungi with the current (then current) botanical code.