Bringing the diversity of Planctomycetes into the light: Introduction to papers from the special issue on novel taxa of
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EDITORIAL
Bringing the diversity of Planctomycetes into the light: Introduction to papers from the special issue on novel taxa of Planctomycetes Damien P. Devos . Olga M. Lage . Iain C. Sutcliffe
Accepted: 11 November 2020 / Published online: 30 November 2020 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Planctomycetes are very intriguing bacteria that impassion, inspire and stimulate the scholars that study them. Discovered in the beginning of the last century, they were initially confused with ’floating fungus’, hence the genus name Planctomyces (planktos, wandering, floating; Gr. masc. n. mukeˆs, fungus; https://lpsn.dsmz.de/genus/planctomyces). However, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that their diversity started to be unveiled (Devos and Ward 2014; Lage et al. 2019; Dedysh et al. 2020a). Together with Chlamydiae, Verrucomicrobia and other poorly described phyla, such as Lentisphaerae, Kiritimatiellaeota and other candidate phyla, they form the Planctomycetes-Verrucomicrobia-Chlamydiae (PVC) superphylum (Wagner and Horn 2006).
D. P. Devos (&) Andaluzian Center for Developmental Biology (CABD), Junta de Andalucı´a, CSIC, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Carretera de Utrera Km 1, 41013 Seville, Spain e-mail: [email protected] O. M. Lage Departamento de Biologia, Faculdade de Cieˆncias, Universidade Do Porto, Rua Do Campo Alegre s/n, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] I. C. Sutcliffe (&) Department of Applied Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST, UK e-mail: [email protected]
Planctomycetes are distinctive bacteria and their divergent characteristics have confused both those scientists analysing them and also those considering them as interesting curiosities (Wiegand et al. 2018; Rivas-Marı´n and Devos 2018). For example, they have been mistakenly proposed to form a third cell type organisation, neither Gram-negative nor Gram-positive (Santarella-Mellwig et al. 2013; Devos 2014a, b; Boedeker et al. 2017). Indeed, they have even been called the ’nucleated’ bacteria (Fuerst 2005). For a long time, they were thought to lack peptidoglycan, an anomaly considered as shared with the Chlamydiae but recently reappraised (Jeske et al. 2015; van Teeseling et al. 2015). These and other misconceptions have pervaded the PVC field for a long time. With the advances in genomics, molecular and microscopy techniques, combined with more sampling, Planctomycetes researchers have begun to fix some of the most obvious misconceptions in the field (reviewed in Devos 2014a, b; Wiegand et al. 2018; Rivas-Marı´n and Devos 2018; Lage et al. 2019). However, two of the real divergent features of Planctomycetes, also shared with Chlamydiae, are their asymmetrical division and their lack of the division protein FtsZ, unique in the free-living bacterial world (Rivas-Marı´n et al. 2016, 2020). In the last 20 years, a great expansion of studies on the biology of Planctomycetes has occurred, showing the great importance and applied potential of these bacteria (Ward 2012; D
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