Miselium

The last decade has produced a significant advance in our appreciation of the diversity of prokaryotic organisms (commonly given the generic term “bacteria”). The need for this improvement was clear as the current list of approximately 5,000 accredited species has long been known to be a major underestimate

For over 50 years, scientists were confident with the notion that there were two basic kinds of living organisms, eubacteria and eukaryotes (306–308). In the late 1970s, this fundamental belief was shattered by the revelations of Woese and coworkers that life consisted not of two but three distinct

We used a phylogenetic approach to analyze the evolution of methanogenesis and methanogens. We show that 23 vertically transmitted ribosomal proteins do not support the monophyly of methanogens, and propose instead that there are two distantly related groups of extant archaea that produce methane, which we have named

Amylomyces rouxii, the filamentous fungus widely used in the production of Asian fermented foods, is closely related to certain strains of Rhizopus oryzae secreting lactic acid. Among seven strains of A. rouxii, CBS 438.76T most vigorously produced both lactic acid and ethanol from glucose, starch, and pectin in

Rhizopus stolonifer is an important post-harvest pathogenic fungus. Recent taxonomic findings based on morphological and growth characteristics led to a dramatic reduction in the number of accepted species within the genus. The aim of this study was to examine this situation with molecular markers. Twenty-nine R. stolonifer strains