Moorella (bacterium)


Moorella is a genus of bacteria belonging to the phylum Firmicutes.
These bacteria are thermophilic, anaerobic and endospore-forming and many species of this genus have been isolated from hot springs.
Some of these species were formerly included within the genus Clostridium, but after a taxonomic rearrangement of the class Clostridia, a phylogenetically distinct genus was identified, which was named Moorella in honor of the American microbiologist W.E.C. Moore.

Phylogeny

The current phylogeny of these bacteria has been inferred from a computational analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA genes of described species belonging to the Moorella Group. The following diagram displaying the species relatedness has been extracted from a wide phylogenetic tree generated from 16S rRNA genes.
Notes:
Moorella thermoautotrophica was formerly named Clostridium thermoautotrophicum, while Clostridium thermoaceticum was the former name of Moorella thermoacetica.
§1 Moorella perchloratireducens was not included in the original tree.
§2 This cladogram also includes other most-related species that do not belong to the genus Moorella:
§2 Calderihabitans maritimus is within the Moorella Group, but belongs to the genus Calderihabitans.
§3 Thermanaeromonas burensis and Thermanaeromonas toyohensis do not belong to the Moorella Group but to genus Thermanaeromonas within the same family Thermoanaerobacteraceae.
A third genus belongs to Moorella Group, namely Ammonifex, but the phylogenetic tree did not include species of this genus among the most-related microorganisms.