New bacterium - Bartonella rochalimae - discovered

[Astronuc]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartonella_rochalimae

Bartonella rochalimae is a recently discovered strain of Gram-negative bacteria in the Bartonella genus, isolated by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The bacterium is a close relative of Bartonella quintana, the microbe which caused trench fever in thousands of soldiers during World War I. Named after Brazilian scientist Henrique da Rocha Lima, . . . .

Watch where you go these days.

[Patty]

Species boundaries are a bit fuzzy in bacteria. They can be determined, for instance, by genetic distance. This means that the new species might be sort of similar in sequence to the previous Bartonella, but some small percentage (~5% or less) diverged at the nucleotide level. Which means, that a new species designation isn't very informative in terms of pathogenicity or anything like that.