The Main Outlines of Bacterial Classification

Phylogenetic Relationships of the Procaryota and the Origin of the Eucaryotic Cell

“…Until comparatively recently the distinction beteen procaryotes and eucaryotes was based on somewhat negative features. Thus Stanier and van Niel (1941) characterized the Procaryota, then termed Monera, by the absence of nuclei, absence of plastids and absence of sexual reproduction. These distinctions, with certain qualifications such as the demonstration of genetic recombination in various Procaryota, are still substantially true, but new techniques have revealed more positive similarities between the various groups of procaryotic organisms.…”

“…There is now an extensive literature dealing with the fine structural and other characteristics of the Procaryota. Only the principal conclusions can be outlined here, but the earlier work has already been lucidly summarized by Stanier and van Niel (1962) and Stanier (1964) while Echlin and Morris (1965) have provided a fairly detailed review of the literature prior to 1965. Later contributions, some of which are considered below, have added to, but not materially altered, the broad interpretations of procaryotic and eucaryotic structure.…”

“…In a relatively early paper Stanier and van Niel (1941) expressed the view that primitive blue-green algae may have developed from the Eubacteriales as a second photosynthetic line, distinct from photosynthetic bacteria. In general terms, the origin of the blue-green algae from simple bacteria is now widely accepted, but in a detailed consideration of the phylogeny of the Procaryota, Klein and Cronquist (1967) consider that an independent development of the elaborate photosynthetic mechanism found in two groups of procaryotes would constitute 'a parallelism unmatched elsewhere in biology'.…”

Bacterial phylogeny based on 16S and 23S rRNA sequence analysis

“…Furthermore, bacteria do not have meaningful developmental stages, and phylogenetically informative bacterial fossils are not available. Thus, bacterial classification remained a determinative one, despite the efforts of microbiologists to infer a natural bacterial classification [6,7].…”

Annotation of Bacteria by Greengenes Classifier Using 16S rRNA Gene Hyper Variable Regions

“…Erwin F. Smith accepted 33 valid different names of bacterial genera and over 150 invalid names in 1905, (Smith 1905) and in 1913 Paul Vuillemin (Vuillemin, 1913) Van Niel, (Stanier, and van Niel, 1941) recognized the Kingdom Monera with 2 phyla, Myxophyta and Schizomycetae. The phylum Schizomycetae comprising classes Eubacteriae with 3 orders, Myxobacteriae, 1 order, and Spiroch-etae, 1 order.…”