
Karl H SchleiferTechnical University of Munich | TUM · Department of Microbiology
Karl H Schleifer
Professor Emeritus
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581
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Introduction
Education
October 1959 - January 1967
University and Technical University of Munich
Field of study
- Chemistry, Biology and Geography
Publications
Publications (581)
Im hohen Alter von fast 97 Jahren verstarb am 29. August 2017 Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Otto Kandler, emeritierter Ordinarius für Botanik der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Durch seinen Tod verlieren wir einen Wissenschaftler von hohem internationalem Ansehen, der Botanik und Mikrobiologie in Deutschland über vier Jahrzehnte geprägt hat.
En.te.ro.coc.ca'ce.ae. N.L. masc. n. Enterococcus type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Enterococcaceae the Enterococcus family. Firmicutes / ?Bacilli? / ?Lactobacillales? / ?Enterococcaceae?
Zy.mo'phi.lus. Gr. n. zyme leaven, yeast; Gr. adj. philos lover; N.L. masc. n. Zymophilus yeast‐lover.
Firmicutes / “Clostridia” / Clostridiales / Veillonellaceae / Zymophilus
Slightly curved, helical, or crescent‐shaped rods (0.7–1.0 × 3–30 µm) with rounded ends, occurring singly, in pairs, or in short chains. Gram‐stain‐negative. Motile. Mobility...
Ma.cro.coc'cus. Gr. adj. macrus large; Gr. masc. n. kokkos a grain or berry; N.L. masc. n. Macrococcus a large coccus.
Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / Bacillales / “Staphylococcaceae” / Macrococcus
Cells are spherical or coccoid , 0.74–2.5 µm in diameter, occurring mostly in pairs and tetrads or in irregular clusters. Nonmotile. Do not form endospores. Gr...
Lac.to.ba.cil.la'les. N.L. masc. n. Lactobacillus type genus of the order; suff. ‐ ales ending to denote an order; N.L. fem. pl. n. Lactobacillales the Lactobacillus order.
Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / “Lactobacillales”
E.ry.si.pe.lo.tri'cha.les. N.L. fem. n. Erysipelothrix type genus of the order; suff. ‐ ales ending to denote an order; N.L. fem. pl. n. Erysipelotrichales the Erysipelothrix order.
Firmicutes / Erysipelotrichia / Erysipelotrichales
E.ry.si.pe.lo.tri'chia. N.L. fem. n. Erysipelothrix type genus of the type order of the class; suff. ‐ ia ending proposed by Gibbons and Murray and by Stackebrandt et al. to denote a class; N.L. neut. pl. n. Erysipelotrichia the Erysipelothrix class.
Firmicutes / Erysipelotrichia
Eu.bac.te.ri.a'ce.ae. N.L. neut. n. Eubacterium type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Eubacteriaceae the Eubacterium family. Firmicutes / “Clostridia” / Clostridiales / “Eubacteriaceae”
Car.no.bac.te.ri.a'ce.ae. N.L. neut. n. Carnobacterium type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Carnobacteriaceae the Carnobacterium family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / “Lactobacillales” / “Carnobacteriaceae”
Spo.ro.lac.to.ba.cil.la'ce.ae. N.L. masc. n. Sporolactobacillus type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Sporolactobacillaceae the Sporolactobacillus family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / Bacillales / “Sporolactobacillaceae”
Staph.y.lo.coc.ca'ce.ae. N.L. masc. n. Staphylococcus type genus of the family; −aceae ending to denote family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Staphylococcaceae the Staphylococcus family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / Bacillales / “Staphylococcaceae”
Staph.y.lo.coc'cus. Gr. n. staphyle bunch of grapes; Gr. n. kokkos a grain or berry; N.L. masc. n. Staphylococcus the grape‐like coccus.
Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / Bacillales / “Staphylococcaceae” / Staphylococcus
Cells spherical , 0.5–1.5 µm in diameter, occurring singly, in pairs, in tetrads, in short chains (3–4 cells), and characteristically divi...
Mag.ne' to.spi.ril' lum . Gr. n. magnes magnet, comb. form magneto‐; Gr. n. spira a spiral; M.L. dim. neut. n. spirillum a small spiral; Magnetospirillum a small magnetic spiral.
Proteobacteria / Alphaproteobacteria / Rhodospirillales / Rhodospirillaceae / Magnetospirillum
Helical (clockwise) spirilla , 0.2–0.7 × 3–4 µm. Occur in freshwater sedimen...
Lac.to.ba.cil.la'ce.ae. N.L. masc. n. Lactobacillus type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Lactobacillaceae the Lactobacillus family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / “Lactobacillales” / Lactobacillaceae
Lis.te.ri.a'ce.ae. N.L. fem. n. Listeria type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Listeriaceae the Listeria family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / Bacillales / “Listeriaceae”
A.e.ro.coc.ca'ce.ae. N.L. masc. n. Aerococcus type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Aerococcaceae the Aerococcus family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / “Lactobacillales” / “Carnobacteriaceae”
Pae.ni.ba.cil.la'ce.ae. N.L. masc. n. Paenibacillus type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Paenibacillaceae the Paenibacillus family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / Bacillales / “Paenibacillaceae”
Plan.o.coc.ca'ce.ae. N.L. masc. n. Planococcus type genus of the family; L. suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Planococcaceae the Planococcus family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / Bacillales / Planococcaceae
Leu.co.nos.to.ca'ce.ae. N.L. neut. n. Leuconostoc type genus of the family; suff. -aceae ending denoting family; N.L. fem. pl. n. Leuconostocaceae the Leuconostoc family. Firmicutes / “Bacilli” / “Lactobacillales” / “Leuconostocaceae”
Ba.cil' li. N.L. masc. n. Bacillus type genus of the type order of the class; N.L. masc. pl. n. Bacilli the Bacillus class.
Firmicutes / “Bacilli”
Publicly available sequence databases of the small subunit ribosomal RNA gene, also known as 16S rRNA in bacteria and archaea, are growing rapidly, and the number of entries currently exceeds 4 million. However, a unified classification and nomenclature framework for all bacteria and archaea does not yet exist. In this Analysis article, we propose...
Cell walls of Bifidobacterium bifidum var. pennsylvanicus were isolated. The polysaccharide consisted of glucose, galactose and rhamnose. Teichoic acid was not present. The murein (peptidoglycan) contained MurNAc, GlcNH 2 NAc, ᴅ-Glu, Ala. ʟ-Ser, ᴅ-Asp and L-Orn in a ratio of about 1 : 1 : 1 : 2 : 1 : 1 : 1. In one batch a high amount of ʟ-glutamic...
The amino acid sequence of the murein of A. atrocyaneus was determined. The peptide subunits L-Ala-γ-D-Glu-L-Lys-D-Ala are crosslinked by the interpeptide bridge L-Ala-L-Ala-L-Ser. The α-carboxyl group of D-glutamic acid is substituted by glycine amide which was never found in any other murein so far.
The All-Species Living Tree Project (LTP) is an international initiative for the creation and maintenance of highly curated 16SrRNA and 23SrRNA gene sequence databases, alignments, and phylogenetic trees for all the type strains of Bacteria and Archaea.
The authors acknowledge the Elsevier Publisher, Max Planck Society, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Projects Consolider Ingenio 2010 CE-CSD2007-0005 and CGL2009_12651-C02-02, both co-financed with FEDER funding) for their economic support
The phylum Firmicutes contains three classes, “Bacilli”, “Clostridia” and “Erysipelotrichia”. The Mollicutes were removed from the phylum given the general low support by alternative markers and its unique phenotypic properties, in particular the lack of rigid cell walls. The family Erysipelotrichaceae, which includes wall-forming Gram-positive org...
The " All-Species Living Tree Project" (LTP) provides the scientific community with a useful taxonomic tool consisting of a curated database of type strain sequences, a universal and optimized alignment and a single phylogenetic tree harboring all the type strains of the hitherto classified species [33]. On the website http://www.arb-silva.de/proje...
The order Rickettsiales (Alphaproteobacteria) is a well-known group containing obligate endocellular prokaryotes. The order encompasses three families (Rickettsiaceae, Anaplasmataceae, and Holosporaceae) and a fourth, family-level cluster, which includes only one candidate species, “Candidatus Midichloria mitochondrii,” as well as several unnamed b...
Includes a revised taxonomic outline for the Firmicutes based upon the SILVA project as well as a description of more than 1346 species and 235 genera belonging to the phylum Firmicutes, which are also called the low mol% G+C Gram positive prokaryotes. Major taxa to be included are Alicyclobacillus, Bacillus, Clostridium, Enterococcus, Erysipelothr...
The late 19th century was the beginning of bacterial taxonomy and bacteria were classified on the basis of phenotypic markers. The distinction of prokaryotes and eukaryotes was introduced in the 1960s. Numerical taxonomy improved phenotypic identification but provided little information on the phylogenetic relationships of prokaryotes. Later on, ch...
Microbial mats in sulfidic cave streams offer unique opportunities to study redox-based biogeochemical nutrient cycles. Previous work from Lower Kane Cave, Wyoming, USA, focused on the aerobic portion of microbial mats, dominated by putative chemolithoautotrophic, sulfur-oxidizing groups within the Epsilonproteobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria. To...
Aerobic sewage granules are dense, spherical biofilms, regarded as a useful and promising tool in wastewater treatment processes. Recent studies revealed that fungi can be implemented in biofilm formation. This study attempts to uncover the fungal diversity in aerobic granules by sequence analysis of the 18S and 5.8S rRNA genes and the internal tra...
Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) using fluorochrome-labeled DNA oligonucleotide probes has been successfully applied for in situ detection of anaerobic ammonium oxidizing (anammox) bacteria. However, application of the standard FISH protocols to visualize anammox bacteria in biofilms from a laboratory-scale wastewater reactor produced only...
Few reports on in situ mRNA detection in bacteria have been published, even though a major aim in environmental microbiology is to link function/activity to the identity of the organisms. This study reports a reliable approach for the in situ detection of nifH mRNA using fluorescence hybridization based on a previously described protocol for pmoA....
This article has no abstract.
Denitrification is an alternative type of anaerobic respiration in which nitrate is reduced to gaseous products via nitrite. The key step in this process is the reduction of nitrite to nitric oxide, which is catalyzed by two structurally different but functionally equivalent forms of nitrite reductase encoded by the nirK and nirS genes. Cultivation...
The signing authors together with the journal Systematic and Applied Microbiology (SAM) have started an ambitious project that has been conceived to provide a useful tool especially for the scientific microbial taxonomist community. The aim of what we have called "The All-Species Living Tree" is to reconstruct a single 16S rRNA tree harboring all s...
Escherichia coli K-12, B, C and W strains and their derivates are declared in biological safety guidelines as risk group 1 organisms as they are unable to colonise the human gut. Differentiation and identification of these safety strains is mainly based on pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), phage sensitivity tests or PCR-based methods. Howeve...
In the past, studies on the relationships of the bacterial phyla Planctomycetes, Chlamydiae, Lentisphaerae, and Verrucomicrobia using different phylogenetic markers have been controversial. Investigations based on 16S rRNA sequence analyses suggested
a relationship of the four phyla, showing the branching order Planctomycetes, Chlamydiae, Verrucomi...
Prosthecobacter, one of the few cultivable representatives of the bacterial phylum Verrucomicrobia, is of increasing interest to the scientific community due to the presence of tubulin genes in its genome and the apparent absence of the bacterial homologue FtsZ that is normally involved in prokaryotic cell division. These findings suggested the pos...
Lower Kane Cave, Wyoming (USA), has hydrogen sulfide-bearing springs that discharge into the cave passage. The springs and cave stream harbour white filamentous microbial mats dominated by Epsilonproteobacteria. Recently, novel 16S rRNA gene sequences from the phylum Acidobacteria, subgroup 7, were found in these cave mats. Although Acidobacteria a...
Escherichia coli K-12, B, C and W strains are the most frequently used bacterial safety and laboratory strains. Lineage-specific DNA fragments were detected by microplate subtractive hybridization and utilized to create a fast differentiation method using a single PCR reaction to differentiate clearly the four lineages and separate them from pathog...
Tubulins are still considered as typical proteins of Eukaryotes. However, more recently they have been found in the unusual bacteria Prosthecobacter (btubAB). In this study, the genomic organization of the btub-genes and their genomic environment were characterized by using the newly developed Two-Step Gene Walking method. In all
investigated Prost...
Aerobic activated sludge granules are dense, spherical biofilms which can strongly improve purification efficiency and sludge settling in wastewater treatment processes. In this study, the structure and development of different granule types were analyzed. Biofilm samples originated from lab-scale sequencing batch reactors which were operated with...
Bacterial endosymbionts of protozoa were often described as new species by protozoologists mainly on the basis of few morphological characters and partly by host specificity. Many of these species have never been validated by prokaryotic microbiologists whose taxonomic rules are quite different from those of protozoologists, who use the Zoological...
Microbiology has entered the molecular age. Almost every month another complete bacterial genome sequence is published (e.g., Fleischmann et al., 1995; Cole et al., 1998), and it is now routine to start the classification of a newly isolated microorganism with the determination and comparative analysis of at least one nucleic acid sequence. Clearly...
A GFPmut3b-tagged derivative of broad host-range plasmid RP4 was used to monitor the conjugative transfer of the plasmid from a Pseudomonas putida donor strain to indigenous bacteria in activated sludge. Transfer frequencies were determined to be in the range of 4×10−6 to 1×10−5 transconjugants per recipient. In situ hybridisation with fluorescentl...
The aim of characterization (in the present context) is to obtain a complete collection of data describing the properties of a prokaryotic pure culture, i.e., to develop a description. The aim of “identification” is to equate the properties of a pure culture with those of a well-characterized and accepted species. When identification in this sense...
The genus Micrococcus consists of Gram-positive spheres occurring in tetrads and in irregular clusters that are usually nonmotile and nonsporeforming. They are catalase positive and usually aerobic with strictly respiratory metabolism. Most species produce carotenoid pigments. The GC content of the DNA ranges from 65 to 75 mol%. There are nine spec...
IntroductionComputerization of microbiological data was first introduced by Sneath (1957) to handle the enormous amount of phenetic data collected to analyze the numerical phenetic taxonomy (NT) of the genus Chromobacterium (105 characters of 45 operational taxonomic units [OTUs]). This work paralleled the work of Sokal and Michener (1958), who use...
HabitatNevskia ramosa is a conspicuous inhabitant of the air-water interface of calm freshwater bodies. Its typical habitat forms by virtue of the dipole character of water molecules and their anisotropic positioning at the surface. The water surface has a high surface tension. Therefore, hydrophobic microlayers develop which accumulate organic mol...
Based on Campylobacter 16S- and 23S-rRNA sequence data oligonucleotide probes specific for thermotolerant campylobacters and for members of the genus Campylobacter have been developed. The 16S-rRNA-targeted probe CAMP 653, recommended for a comprehensive detection of members of the genus Campylobacter, specifically detected all Campylobacter strain...
For detection of most members of the Enterococcaceae, the specificity of a novel oligonucleotide microarray (ECC-PhyloChip) consisting of 41 hierarchically nested 16S or 23S rRNA gene-targeted probes was evaluated with 23 pure cultures (including 19 Enterococcus species). Target nucleic acids were prepared by PCR amplification of a 4.5-kb DNA fragm...
The taxonomic position of Enterobacter dissolvens was re-evaluated based on the analysis of the type strain ATCC 23373T and three clinical isolates. The strains were assigned to the genetic cluster of the species by phylogenetic sequence analysis in the frame of a recent population genetic study. The relatedness of E. dissolves to the other species...
A new species, Enterobacter ludwigii, is presented on the basis of the characteristics of 16 strains, which were isolated from clinical specimens. These bacteria form a distinct genetic cluster in phylogenetic analyses of the population structure of the Enterobacter cloacae complex. As determined by DNA-DNA cross-hybridization experiments in microp...
A Gram-negative, slightly halophilic, non-pigmented, strictly aerobic, chemo-organotrophic bacterium was isolated from Mediterranean sea water off the Spanish coast near Valencia. This strain was poorly reactive, being unable to grow in most carbon sources analysed in minimal medium. However, good growth was observed when more complex media and lon...
A Gram-negative, slightly halophilic, strictly aerobic, chemo-organotrophic bacterium was isolated from Mediterranean sea water near Valencia (Spain). Comparison of the almost complete 16S rRNA gene sequence showed that strain 4SM3(T) belonged to the Roseobacter group, with Jannaschia helgolandensis as its closest relative, with a similarity of 98....
The mureins of several micrococci and coryneform organisms contain more than one mole of glutamic acid per mole of meso-diaminopimelic acid (Dpm). The amino acid sequence of these mureins was studied. The peptide subunit consists of Mur-l-Ala-γ-d-Glu-meso-Dpm-d-Ala, where Mur = muramic acid. The γ-carboxyl group of glutamic acid is substituted in m...
Tubulins are typical eucaryotic genes, which have recently been found in the free-living bacteria Prosthecobacter (Verrucomicrobiales). Nevertheless, microtubule-like structures were never observed in Prostecobacter, whereas they were reported in epixenosomes which are symbiotic Verrucomicrobiales of the ciliate Euplotidium. In the present work, an...
Refractile inclusion bodies, called R-bodies were observed within the cells of some bacterial strains. They are protein ribbons, which are typically coiled into cylindrical structures. They are produced by members of the genus Caedibacter, gram-negative rod-shaped endosymbionts of paramecia and e.g. the free-living bacteria Hydrogenophaga taeniospi...
Verrucomicrobiales are a newly proposed, deep branched division of bacteria from which only a handful of cultured isolates are available. Culture-independent analysis of environmental samples shows that members of Verrucomicrobiales are widespread and can be divided into several subdivisions. Symbiotic species of Euplotidium (Ciliophora) and Nemato...
We characterized nine macronuclear tubulin gene minichromosomes in the hypotrich ciliate Euplotidium itoi: two α-tubulin genes, five β-tubulin genes, and two γ-tubulin genes. In particular, one peculiar β-tubulin gene was identified. It shows only 81.5% amino acid similarity to the other characterized β-tubulin types and an UAG stop codon in frame....
Up to half of the biomass in the rumen can be represented by ciliates, which play an important role in the digestion processes of their hosts. In the literature, very little information can be found on determination of the diversity of complex rumen ciliate communities. The identification of these fast moving protists is mainly based on live observ...
The genus Listeria contains the two pathogenic species Listeria monocytogenes and Listeria ivanovii and the four apparently apathogenic species Listeria innocua, Listeria seeligeri, Listeria welshimeri, and Listeria grayi. Pathogenicity of the former two species is enabled by an approximately 9 kb virulence gene cluster which is also present in a m...