Republication of "New Species Announcement", a new format to prompt the description of new human microbial species

Pierre-Edouard Fournier (1) , Didier Raoult (1, 2) , Michel Drancourt (1)

1 URMITE - Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes
2 IHU Marseille - Institut Hospitalier Universitaire Méditerranée Infection

The study of human microbiota emerged as one of the most active fields of microbiology over the past 10 years. This research has been fueled by the extensive use of culture, an approach that we named “culturomics”. As an example, starting culturomics in 2009 Lagier et al. isolated 337 gut bacterial species, including 31 new species. They were published, but the names of only 17 of them have officially been validated to date. This rate of discovery will accelerate with the rebirth of culture as it has been estimated that only 30% of this microbiota has been characterized so far so that many new species are expected to be described in the coming years. We recently proposed a new editorial format named «New Species Announcement» to be shared by New Microbes and New Infections journal (NMNI) [4]. We and here copy this proposal to invite authors of Human Microbiome Journal (HUMIC). The present editorial parallels therefore the one previously published.

Mots clés: Bacterial species; 16S rRNA; Taxonomy; Open data; New microorganism

Domaines: Bactériologie; Systématique, phylogénie et taxonomie

Pierre-Edouard Fournier, Didier Raoult, Michel Drancourt. Republication of "New Species Announcement", a new format to prompt the description of new human microbial species. Human Microbiome Journal, 2016, 1, pp.A1-A2. ⟨10.1016/j.humic.2016.05.001⟩. ⟨hal-01476116⟩