Journal of Bacteriology & Parasitology

Polyphasic taxonomy - The Class Actinobacteria

46^th World Congress on Microbiology

September 18-19, 2017 Dublin, Ireland

Joachim Wink

Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), Germany

Keynote: J Bacteriol Parasitol

Abstract:

Members of the class Actinobacteria plays an important role for humans, on one hand we have producer of antibiotics, which mainly belong to the so called Sporoactinomycetes like Streptomyces or Amycolatopsis and on the other hand the pathogenic ones like many species of the Mycobacteria and Nocardia. Actinobacteria are typical soil bacteria, but also inhabit many other habitats, so that they could be isolated from different materials. Even their morphology has been used for the characterization for many years; today a number of molecular biological methods are also available for their taxonomic classification. In the 90th of the last century the polyphasic approach for the classification of bacteria was introduced and is also today the way to identify a species of the Actinobacteria. This approach combines the methods of the morphology and physiology, together with the chemotaxonomic methods and the methods of the molecular biological characterization. The wide variety of the morphology of the different Actinobacteria, we find coccoid and rod shaped single cell forming species like in the Micrococcales, as well as, organisms that form mycelia and differentiate with spore chains or sporangia, made it very important for the identification and classification of this bacteria to have a number of methods available. Especially after finding the different morphological features also in different genera and families the chemotaxonomy became very important in the 60th of the last century. The molecular biological characterization methods opened a number of additional tools, but there are many examples that they also cannot stand alone. Aim of the workshop is after a short introduction of the bacterial class to show the different aspects of the polyphasic taxonomy basing on the work of Vandamme et al. with the class Actinobacteria as an example. It will be discussed if the molecular biological characterization will replace morphology and chemotaxonomy.

Biography :

Joachim Wink has completed his PhD in 1985 from Frankfurt University. He then went to the pharmaceutical industry and started his career at the Hoechst AG, where he was responsible for the strain collection and specialized in the cultivation and taxonomic characterization of Actinobacteria and Myxobacteria. During the years, he was responsible for the strain library within the pharmaceutical research and a number of screening projects with Hoechst Marion Russel, Aventis and Sanofi. In the year 2005, he did his habilitation at the Carolo Wilhelma University of Braunschweig and in 2012 he went to the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, where he founded the working group of the strain collection with its focus on Myxobacteria. Here, he is now working on the isolation and taxonomic characterization of Myxobacteria and Actinobacteria, as well as, the analysis of their secondary metabolites. He has published more than 50 papers on secondary metabolites and the taxonomy of the producing microorganisms in reputed journals, a number of reviews, as well as, book chapters and more than 35 patents. He is the Editorial Board Member of a number of international journals.