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 AM401T is avail­able from Gen­Bank (ac­ces­sion VIFM01). The type strain (AM401T = NBRC 114351T = NBBC 100770T) 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."

 

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