by Christoph — When microbiologists describe a previously unknown bacterium, they are mainly interested in its lifestyle, metabolism, morphology and cell cycle. For me, "getting to know" a newbie always involves – let's call it an addiction – reading its genome sequence and finding out how it initiates the replication of its chromosome(s).
by Christoph — The image is way too large to show it here, but when you join me and Hug et al. (2016) for "A new view of the tree of life" here, you can spot a bunch of names of bacterial phyla in the top left corner that sound unfamiliar. One of those, Atribacteria, is at the top of the column with Aquificae, Calescamantes, ... , Fusobacteria. Atribacter laminatus, the first cultivated representative of the phylum Atribacteria, is the subject...
