rotting wood, rock samples and raw fish: explore this month's diverse discoveries
posted on october 1, 2024 by clare baker
each month, the 英格兰vs美国谁会赢？ publishes the international journal of systematic and evolutionary microbiology, which details newly discovered species of bacteria, fungi and protists. here are some of the new species that have been discovered and the places they've been found.
welcome back to ‘new to science’, we have some real treats for you this month, including a new archaea discovery, a yeast isolated from rotting wood and new microbes found in respiratory samples from botswana.
it’s halloween this month, we’re starting this edition of new to science featuring microbes found in spooky locations. our first spooky location is some rotting wood located on an isolated mountain – qingyuan mountain, fujian province, pr china. here is where we find our novel yeast strain, cyberlindnera qingyuanensis, which earns its name from that location.
spooky location number two is a creepy-looking animal that’s closely related to a starfish, ophioplocus japonicus, commonly known as the brittle star. our creepy star was found in a tidal pool in wakayama, japan, taken to a laboratory where it was washed with artificial seawater and a portion of its arm was removed. researchers found two new, gram-stain-negative bacterial strains on the surface of the arm. the two strains were called paralimibaculum aggregatum and biformimicrobium ophioploci.
our next microbe was found on something that might be yuck for some but yum for others - cutlassfish jeotgal. jeotgal is a traditional fermented food prepared by salting and seasoning raw animal ingredients in this case, it was made from cutlassfish. the new microbe, vagococcus jeotgali, was discovered during an investigation on microbial communities present in jeotgal and is named after the delicacy. v. jeotgali, a lactic acid bacteria, may be crucial in the fermentation process, fermenting carbohydrates and generating energy.
speaking of some people loving it, and others hating it, our next microbe grew on complex substrates such as yeast and beef extracts. oxyplasma meridianum is an archaeon strain isolated from a rock sample from the beautiful vulcano island in italy. the strain is extremely acidophilic; its optimal ph for growth was 1.0 and it grew in a range of temperatures between 15 and 52 °c.
dolosigranulum savutiense is our finisher this month, it’s a bacterium that was isolated from nasopharyngeal swabs collected from infants and their mothers enrolled in a prospective cohort study in botswana. it’s named d. savutiense after savuti, a geographical region of cultural significance in botswana, where it was found. our microbe is joined in the genus by dolosigranulum pigrum, which was first isolated from post-mortem spinal cord tissue and eye and contact lens swabs collected from a woman with blurred vision and eye pain. it has been recognised as a promising nasal probiotic candidate and is closely related to d. savutiense, so could our microbe be the same?