Historical Aspects
Owing to its cell form, growth behavior and habitat within grass roots, the first isolates of the later defined genus Herbaspirillum were initially thought to be a new Azospirillum species (Baldani et al., 1984). However, RNA-RNA hybridization experiments showed no close relatedness with Azospirillum spp. or Aquaspirillum itersonii (Falk et al., 1986). The first species of the newly defined genus Herbaspirillum, Herbaspirillum seropedicae (Baldani et al., 1986), was named after the location of the EMBRAPA National Center for Agrobiology (CNPAB) in Seropedica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The genus Herbaspirillum was extended with [Pseudomonas] rubrisubalbicans, causative agent of “mottled strip disease” in some susceptible sugar-cane varieties, because DNA-rDNA and DNA-DNA reassociation hybridization studies showed a high degree of DNA similarity (Gillis et al., 1990; Baldani et al., 1992). Additional physiological and biochemical features, including the ability to fix...
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Schmid, M., Baldani, J.I., Hartmann, A. (2006). The Genus Herbaspirillum . In: Dworkin, M., Falkow, S., Rosenberg, E., Schleifer, KH., Stackebrandt, E. (eds) The Prokaryotes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30745-1_7
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