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The Genus Thermus and Relatives

  • Reference work entry
The Prokaryotes

Introduction

In 1969, Brock and Freeze described a thermophilic organism that they named Thermus aquaticus. Since then the bacteria of the genus Thermus have become the archetypal thermophilic bacteria even though other organisms have been described that grow at much higher temperatures. Not only are these organisms easy to grow, but some strains are transformable and are rapidly becoming the mainstays of molecular biology of thermophilic bacteria. The importance of these organisms to our knowledge of thermophilic lifestyles was recently reaffirmed by the complete genome sequencing of Thermus thermophilus HB27 (Henne et al., 2004).

This chapter should probably be entitled the “Family Thermaceae” or the “Order Thermales” as defined by us (da Costa and Rainey, 2001a; Rainey and da Costa, 2001), but we have decided to retain the title of the original chapter in The Prokaryotes as an indication of continuity and because the species of the genus Thermuscontinue to be the most studied...

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Authors
  1. Milton S. Da Costa
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  2. Fred A. Rainey
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  3. M. Fernanda Nobre
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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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Da Costa, M.S., Rainey, F.A., Nobre, M.F. (2006). The Genus Thermus and Relatives. In: Dworkin, M., Falkow, S., Rosenberg, E., Schleifer, KH., Stackebrandt, E. (eds) The Prokaryotes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30747-8_32

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