and spp. nov., Two Novel Members from a Clade of Fastidious Purple Sulfur Bacteria That Exhibit Unique Red-Shifted Light-Harvesting Capabilities.

In the pursuit of cultivating anaerobic anoxygenic phototrophs with unusual absorbance spectra, a purple sulfur bacterium was isolated from the shoreline of Baltrum, a North Sea island of Germany. It was designated strain 970, due to a predominant light harvesting complex (LH) absorption maximum at 963-966 nm, which represents the furthest infrared-shift documented for such complexes containing bacteriochlorophyll . A polyphasic approach to bacterial systematics was performed, comparing genomic, biochemical, and physiological properties.

Microbial fingerprints reveal interaction between museum objects, curators, and visitors.

Microbial communities reside at the interface between humans and their environment. Whether the microbiome can be leveraged to gain information on human interaction with museum objects is unclear. To investigate this, we selected objects from the Museum für Naturkunde and the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, Germany, varying in material and size.

Touching the (almost) untouchable: a minimally invasive workflow for microbiological and biomolecular analyses of cultural heritage objects.

Microbiological and biomolecular approaches to cultural heritage research have expanded the established research horizon from the prevalent focus on the cultural objects' conservation and human health protection to the relatively recent applications to provenance inquiry and assessment of environmental impacts in a global context of a changing climate. Standard microbiology and molecular biology methods developed for other materials, specimens, and contexts could, in principle, be applied to cultural heritage research. However, given certain characteristics common to several heritage objects-such as uniqueness, fragility, high value, and restricted access, tailored approaches are required.

sp. nov., a marine bacterium isolated from coastal seawater.

A novel Gram-negative, aerobic, motile, rod-shaped, beige-pigmented bacterium, strain ARW1-2F2, was isolated from a seawater sample collected from Roscoff, France. Strain ARW1-2F2 was catalase-negative and oxidase-positive, and grew under mesophilic, neutrophilic and halophilic conditions. The 16S rRNA sequences revealed that strain ARW1-2F2 was closely related to LFT 1.

Adaptation of Surface-Associated Bacteria to the Open Ocean: A Genomically Distinct Subpopulation of Colonizes Pacific Mesozooplankton.

The marine group encompasses numerous species which occupy a large variety of ecological niches. However, members of the genus are specifically adapted to a surface-associated lifestyle and have so far been found nearly exclusively in disjunct, man-made environments including shellfish and fish aquacultures, as well as harbors. Therefore, the possible natural habitats, dispersal and evolution of spp.