In the opinion of the authors, the genus name Rhodoligotrophos was formed in violation of Principle 3 and Rule 10a of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes which requires that genus names are to be treated as Latin substantives. We therefore propose renaming the genus Rhodoligotrophos as Rhodoligotrophus. A Request for an Opinion is submitted to the Judicial Commission of the In...

Biologists have long thought that the internal workings of prokary­ otes—the smallest and simplest organisms, including bacteria—are well understood, and have accordingly consid­ ered eukaryotic organisms and their cells to be more fascinating objects for study. During the past decade, however, the focus of some research has begun to turn back to prokaryotes—particularly because genomic analyse...

Genes that are part of the same operon in prokaryotes, or have the same expression pattern in eukaryotes, are transcriptionally co-regulated. If genes are consistently co-regulated across distantly related organisms, the genes have closely associated functions. It has been shown previously that such genes have a strong tendency to belong to the same protein complex in prokaryotes, and we show b...

Even genetically distant prokaryotes can exchange genes between them, and these horizontal gene transfer events play a central role in adaptation and evolution. While this was long thought to be restricted to prokaryotes, certain eukaryotes have acquired genes of bacterial origin. However, gene acquisitions in eukaryotes are thought to be much less important in magnitude than in prokaryotes. He...

DNA methylation is one of the best studied epigenetic modifications observed in prokaryotes as well as eukaryotes. It affects nearby gene expression. Most DNA methylation reactions in prokaryotes are catalyzed by a DNA methyltransferase, the modification enzyme of a restriction-modification (RM) system. Its target recognition domain (TRD) recognizes a specific DNA sequence for methylation. In t...