Ten species comprise half of the bacteriology literature, leaving most species unstudied

2025/01/04 by Paul A. Jensen · 2 voices · 5 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology #Gut microbiota and health

paper · pdf · doi:10.1101/2025.01.04.631297

Abstract

Microbiology research has historically focused on a few species of model organisms. Our bibliographic analysis finds extreme bias in the distribution of bacteriology research across species, with half of all papers referencing only ten species and 74% of all known species remaining unstudied. Microbiologists will need to broaden their perspective and embrace complexity to develop a complete understanding of the microbial world.

Cited by

• Ancient Species Diversity and Niche Adaptation in <i>Tannerella</i> and <i>Porphyromonas</i> Revealed Through Pangenomics
• Structural and evolutionary insights into understudied bacterial serine–threonine pseudokinase families
• Hidden Markov Model-Based Prokaryotic Genome Space Mining Reveals the Widespread Pervasiveness of Complex I and Its Potential Evolutionary Scheme
• Decoding functional genes across species with annotation-independent machine learning
• These are the 20 most-studied bacteria — the majority have been ignored

Discussions

• The source of our inspiration to do this analysis was this nice paper that came out a few months ago by Paul Jensen considering the distribution of research effort across bacterial species (doi.org/10 [bsky, 12 points, 2 comments]
• Some part of key interactions with the host and metabolism are missing, to understand the microbiome in health and disease. Ten species comprise half of the bacteriology literature, leaving most spec [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Impact of Culture-Independent Studies on the Emerging Phylogenetic View of Bacterial Diversity
• Defining Pathogenic Bacterial Species in the Genomic Era
• Nature should be the model for microbial sciences
• ‘What’s in a name? Fit-for-purpose bacterial nomenclature’: meeting report
• Great Short History of Microbiology Development as a Science