Studying within-species variation has traditionally been limited to culturable bacterial
isolates and low-resolution microbial community fingerprinting. Metagenomic sequencing …

▪ Abstract Since the delineation of 12 bacterial phyla by comparative phylogenetic analyses
of 16S ribosomal RNA in 1987 knowledge of microbial diversity has expanded dramatically …

A fundamental question in microbiology is whether there is continuum of genetic diversity
among genomes, or clear species boundaries prevail instead. Whole-genome similarity …

Horizontal genetic transfer (HGT) has played an important role in bacterial evolution at least
since the origins of the bacterial divisions, and HGT still facilitates the origins of bacterial …

Enterococcus faecium, natively a gut commensal organism, emerged as a leading cause of
multidrug-resistant hospital-acquired infection in the 1980s. As the living record of its …

Humans normally experience the conscious self as localized within their bodily borders. This
spatial unity may break down in certain neurological conditions such as out-of-body …

Periodontal diseases are initiated by bacterial species living in polymicrobial biofilms at or
below the gingival margin and progress largely as a result of the inflammation elicited by …

Actinobacteria constitute one of the largest phyla among Bacteria and represent gram-
positive bacteria with a high G+ C content in their DNA. This bacterial group includes …

Vibrios are ubiquitous and abundant in the aquatic environment. A high abundance of
vibrios is also detected in tissues and/or organs of various marine algae and animals, eg …

An ad hoc committee for the re-evaluation of the species definition in bacteriology met in
Gent, Belgium, in February 2002. The committee made various recommendations regarding …