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Nanobdellota

Phylum of archaea

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Discovery and taxonomy

By the end of the 1990s, three groups of Archaea were recognised: Crenarchaeota, Euryarchaeota and Korarchaeota. The groups were variously designated as kingdoms or phyla. In 2002, Harald Huber and his colleagues at the University of Regensburg and Max Planck Institute for Medical Research discovered a new archaea from a submarine hot vent in Iceland. The species could not be fitted into any of the known groups so that they created a new phylum "Nanoarchaeota" for the new species they named Nanoarchaeum equitans.

In 2022, Japanese scientists led by Shingo Kato described a new species Nanobdella aerobiophila discovered from a terrestrial hot spring in Japan. For the classification, they created family Nanobdellaceae, order Nanobdellales and class Nanobdellia. In 2023, they introduced a new phylum Nanobdellota for the species. According to the revised International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP, Prokaryotic Code) of 2022, the name of a taxon cannot be created using the same spelling of the stem taxon, genus name, which is not validly published. Nanoarchaeota was not a validly published name while Nanobdella is a valid name and thus, Nanobdellota is accepted as the correct name of the phylum, and a new kingdom Nanobdellati was created in 2023.

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GenusTaxonomic rank above species and below familyFamily (taxonomy)Taxonomic rank between genus and orderEndemismState of species being unique to a locationCladeGroup of a common ancestor and all of their descendantsGenomeAll genetic material of an organismOrder (taxonomy)Taxonomic rank between class and family