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The Colorless Sulfur Bacteria

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The Prokaryotes

Footnote 1

The name “the colorless sulfur bacteria” has been used since the time of Winogradsky to designate prokaryotes that are either able, or believed to be able, to use reduced sulfur compounds (e.g., sulfide, sulfur, and organic sulfides) as sources of energy for growth. Today, it is known that this group comprises a very heterogeneous collection of bacteria, many of which have little or no taxonomic relationship to each other. The colorless sulfur bacteria play an essential role in the oxidative side of the sulfur cycle (Fig. 1). Like all of the element cycles, the sulfur cycle has an oxidative and a reductive side, which, in most ecosystems, are in balance. However, this balance does not always exist, and accumulations of intermediates such as sulfur, iron sulfides, and hydrogen sulfide are often found. On the reductive side, sulfate (and sometimes elemental sulfur) functions as an electron acceptor in the metabolic pathways used by a wide range of anaerobic bacteria, leading...

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter was taken unchanged from the second edition

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Authors
  1. Lesley A. Robertson
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  2. J. Gijs Kuenen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Microbiology, University of Minnesota, Box 196, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0312, USA

    Martin Dworkin Professor Dr. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

  2. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University Medical School, 299 Campus Drive, Fairchild, D039, Stanford, CA, 94305-5124, USA

    Stanley Falkow

  3. Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, Tel Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, 69978, Israel

    Eugene Rosenberg

  4. Department of Microbiology, Technical University Munich, 80290, Munich, Germany

    Karl-Heinz Schleifer

  5. DSMZ- German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, Mascheroder Weg 1b, 38124, Braunschweig, Germany

    Erko Stackebrandt

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag

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Robertson, L.A., Kuenen, J.G. (2006). The Colorless Sulfur Bacteria. In: Dworkin, M., Falkow, S., Rosenberg, E., Schleifer, KH., Stackebrandt, E. (eds) The Prokaryotes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30742-7_31

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