What's your name?

I figured to start off the new year I'd do something a little different. As I've written about before, I'm intrigued by how people come up with the names of the organisms they identify. So, I'm going to start a once-monthly blog entry (we'll see how long I can keep it up) highlighting some of the more interesting ones I come across.

The best resource for this is the International Journal of Systemic and Evolutionary Microbiology, so it will be the journal a majority of my citations come from. You'll notice that I'm running a year behind in the journal because for some reason our institution doesn't carry this journal *grumble*. I guess this qualifies as a Research Blogging entry as well, no? So here goes... our main entry:

1. Halorhabdus tiamatea - (ti.a.ma.te'a. N.L. fem. adj. tiamatea belonging to, or related to, Tiamat, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of ‘the primal abyss’ and salty water). Named after a Mesopotamian goddess, this organism is extremely halophilic.

... and now for a few others ...

2. Nocardioides daphniae - (daph'ni.ae. N.L. gen. n. daphniae pertaining to the water flea genus Daphnia, as the type strain was isolated from Daphnia cucullata). Self-explanatory.

3. Salinicoccus iranensis - I doubt this one will come as much of a surprise, looking at the species name ... (i.ran.en'sis. N.L. masc. adj. iranensis from Iran, where the organism was isolated). Yep, no brainer there.

4. The next group got to name the genus AND species of this organism, Perlucidibaca piscinae. Perlucidibaca - Per.lu.ci.di.ba'ca. L. adj. perlucidus transparent, pellucid; L. fem. n. baca a small round fruit, a berry; N.L. fem. n. Perlucidibaca a transparent berry, and piscinae - pis.ci'nae. L. gen. n. piscinae "of a fish-pond".

5. Methylobacterium iners - (i'ners. L. neut. adj. iners inactive, lazy). I guess this fellow isn't very motile.

Primary Article
Antunes, A., Taborda, M., Huber, R., Moissl, C., Nobre, M., & da Costa, M. (2008). Halorhabdus tiamatea sp. nov., a non-pigmented, extremely halophilic archaeon from a deep-sea, hypersaline anoxic basin of the Red Sea, and emended description of the genus Halorhabdus. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMATIC AND EVOLUTIONARY MICROBIOLOGY, 58 (1), 215-220 DOI: 10.1099/ijs.0.65316-0