Bacterial Systematics

[Scott Federhen]

I'm Scott Federhen, and I am part of the GenBank Taxonomy Project.

The NCBI taxonomy is not a primary taxonomic resource or authority -
it is intended to be a convenient index into the organisms represented
in the sequence databases, and we attempt to incorporate phylogenetic
and taxonomic knowledge from a variety of sources. It is a work in
progress, and we welcome specific comments and criticisms in any of
the areas covered by our database. (I have ranked the Proteobacteria
as a phylum, and removed the premature 'Burkholderiales')
Please send mail to info at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

For bacterial nomenclature two excellent general sites are:

  http://www.dsmz.de/bactnom/bactname.htm
  http://www-sv.cict.fr/bacterio/

The RDP maintains a bacterial phylogeny based on ribosomal RNA
sequences -

  http://www.cme.msu.edu/RDP/html/index.html

But, as several people have already pointed out, for anyone who is
really interested in bacterial classification there is no substitute
for the standard reference tomes - "Bergey's Manual of Systematic
Bacteriology" (with the first volume of a new edition due out this
summer) and "The Prokaryotes" (2nd ed.) - and of course the primary
scientific literature. Of particular interest here is the IJSB
(recently renamed the IJSEM), which currently provides free
full-text access on it's web site:

  http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/

:Scott federhen at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
 GenBank Taxonomy Group
 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/tax.html