The researchers assembled a stratified panel of 237 complete bacterial genomes, deliberately chosen to span diverse ecological niches and genome-level characteristics such as size, GC content, and coding capacity. Rather than trusting annotation pipelines alone, they combined annotation-guided screening with profile hidden Markov model searches, a sensitive method for detecting remote protein homologs, and then manually reconstructed each candidate urease locus to confirm its architecture. The panel was then classified into three tiers: genomes with at least one complete urease locus, genomes with candidate but incomplete neighborhoods, and genomes with no supported urease system at all.

The headline numbers are striking in themselves. Of the 237 genomes, 149 encoded at least one complete urease locus, 11 carried candidate but incomplete neighborhoods, and 77 had no detectable urease genes whatsoever. Across the panel, the authors recovered 173 urease-associated genomic neighborhoods. The overwhelming majority, 150 loci, followed the canonical ureABC architecture, in which three structural genes encode the alpha, beta, and gamma subunits that assemble into the active enzyme, typically flanked by accessory genes such as ureD, ureE, ureF, and ureG that shepherd nickel ions into the catalytic center.

Against this conserved backdrop, one alternative design stood out. Seven loci, all confined to Helicobacter, displayed a fused configuration in which the structural genes are arranged as an AB fusion rather than as separate reading frames. This arrangement, best known from the gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori, persisted in the dataset as a small but stable, lineage-restricted architecture, a reminder that even a deeply conserved enzyme system can tolerate structural tinkering within particular evolutionary branches. Sixteen additional loci were classified as partial or split, highlighting how assembly artifacts, pseudogenization, or genuine decay can blur the boundaries of what counts as a functional urease system.

One of the study’s most intriguing findings concerns genomes that carry two complete canonical urease systems at once. Eight genomes in the panel encoded duplicated loci, and in every case both copies mapped to the same top-level assembly sequence record, ruling out contamination from separate plasmids or unplaced contigs. When the authors compared the two copies within each genome, they found that the paired loci differed in gene order and typically shared only about 62 to 63 percent identity across their concatenated ureABC sequences. That level of divergence is far too deep to reflect a recent, exact duplication. Instead, it points to older internal duplication followed by divergence, or to the secondary acquisition of a second, foreign urease module at some earlier point in the lineage’s history.

To probe how urease systems move across evolutionary distances, the authors built a gene tree from concatenated ureABC sequences and compared it with a genome-wide species tree for the same organisms. If a urease gene tree places a locus next to species that are, by the species tree, only distant relatives, that incongruence is a classic signature of horizontal gene transfer. The comparison flagged 12 candidate incongruent loci, all of them complete canonical systems, marking them as the strongest candidates for intergeneric transfer within the dataset.

Manual inspection of the most compelling examples revealed something ecologically coherent rather than random. Several candidate transfer events clustered in nitrifying bacteria and marine cyanobacteria, two groups for which urea hydrolysis has clear adaptive value: nitrifiers gain a supplemental nitrogen and energy substrate, while ocean-dwelling picocyanobacteria such as Prochlorococcus can exploit urea as a reduced nitrogen source in nutrient-poor waters. In enteric bacteria, the incongruent urease neighborhoods were strikingly associated with nickel transport and hydrogenase-related genes, suggesting that these loci arrived as coordinated functional packages, carrying not just the enzyme but the machinery needed to supply its essential nickel cofactor.

The broader significance of the work lies in its reframing of urease as an evolutionary mosaic. The catalytic core, the ureABC trimer and its nickel metallocenter, is architecturally conserved to a remarkable degree, reflecting the stringent biochemical requirements of activating carbon dioxide and ammonia chemistry with a nickel center. But the surrounding genomic context, including transporters, accessory proteins, and regulatory elements, varies substantially between lineages, tailored to the specific ecological pressures each bacterium faces. The study’s locus-level reconstruction, rather than single-gene screening, is what made this layered picture visible, and the authors argue that future comparative work should treat the entire neighborhood, not just ureC, as the unit of analysis.

The findings also carry practical weight. Urease activity underpins a remarkable range of applications and problems: it drives infection-associated kidney stone formation by Proteus mirabilis, enables H. pylori to survive stomach acid, contributes to ammonia toxicity in ruminant digestion, and powers engineered biomineralization technologies that use ureolytic bacteria to cement sand, seal concrete cracks, and remove heavy metals from water. Understanding which organisms carry which urease architectures, how those systems are regulated by nickel availability, and how readily they move between lineages could sharpen predictions about pathogen virulence, soil nitrogen cycling, and the design of biomineralizing microbial consortia.

As genome databases continue to expand, studies of this kind will only grow more informative. The stratified panel approach used here, combining ecological metadata with rigorous locus reconstruction and species-tree comparison, offers a template for interrogating other multi-gene microbial systems whose distribution may likewise be shaped by a mix of vertical inheritance, duplication, and horizontal exchange. For urease, the message is clear: the enzyme’s blueprint is ancient and shared, but its passport has been stamped many times as it traveled between bacterial genera across evolutionary time.

Subject of Research: Comparative phylogenomics of bacterial urease gene systems across diverse bacterial genomes

Article Title: Comparative phylogenomics of bacterial urease systems reveals architectural conservation, lineage-specific specialization, and candidate horizontal transfer

Article References: Comparative phylogenomics of bacterial urease systems reveals architectural conservation, lineage-specific specialization, and candidate horizontal transfer. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-026-02507-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00438-026-02507-y

Keywords: urease, bacteria, phylogenomics, horizontal gene transfer, gene duplication, nickel metalloenzyme, Helicobacter pylori, nitrogen cycling, marine cyanobacteria, nitrifiers, genomics, ureABC

The study, published in BMC Genomics by Boonfei Tan and Charmaine Ng of the Institutional Research Office at Manila Central University, systematically screened release 220 of the Genome Taxonomy Database, a curated collection of bacterial and archaeal genomes that spans much of known prokaryotic diversity. The search identified candidate rdhA sequences in 1,576 genomes distributed across 39 phyla. After applying motif validation filters designed to remove false positives and incomplete fragments, the researchers retained 2,392 homologs from 1,409 genomes across 36 phyla as their analytical dataset, a scale that allowed them to ask questions about mobility, taxonomy, and habitat associations that smaller surveys could not address.

Classification of these homologs by motif architecture and genomic neighbourhood revealed four distinct classes. The first and most functionally familiar group consists of canonical respiratory rdhA-rdhB loci, in which the catalytic rdhA gene is paired with rdhB, a gene encoding a membrane anchor protein, and the catalytic subunit carries a twin-arginine translocation, or TAT, signal peptide that directs export of the folded enzyme across the cytoplasmic membrane. This triad of features is the hallmark of enzymes used in organohalide respiration, a metabolism in which halogenated compounds serve as terminal electron acceptors. The second class, by far the largest, comprises solitary catabolic-like homologs lacking the rdhB partner and the canonical respiratory signature, numbering 1,845 proteins. The third class consists of tandem-array loci, with 153 proteins arranged in multiple adjacent copies, and the fourth captures other, less stereotyped architectures, accounting for 231 proteins.

The most striking finding concerns mobility. Nearly half of the canonical respiratory rdhA-rdhB loci, 48.5 percent, carried flanking mobility elements such as transposases, integrases, or other signatures of horizontal gene transfer machinery. In contrast, only 11.3 percent of the solitary catabolic-like homologs were associated with such elements. Crucially, the researchers showed that this contrast is not an artefact of taxonomy. Within Pseudomonadota, the respiratory loci carried mobility elements in 42.9 percent of cases versus 11.2 percent for catabolic-like homologs, and within Chloroflexota, a phylum famous for its dehalorespiring members, the figures were 65.5 percent versus 11.8 percent. Because the pattern repeats within individual phyla, it reflects a genuine architectural difference rather than a confounding effect of which organisms happen to carry which genes.

Horizontal transfer in the respiratory subset also reached further across the tree of life. Fifty-six percent of apparent transfers involving canonical respiratory loci crossed phylum boundaries, compared with just 13 percent for catabolic-like homologs. Once the phylum composition of the dataset was accounted for, this amounted to a 2.8-fold enrichment of cross-phylum transfer in the respiratory class. In practical terms, the genes that enable microbes to respire organohalides appear to be packaged for long-range evolutionary travel, hopping between distantly related lineages far more readily than their catabolic-like cousins, which tend to remain within the lineages where they are found.

Five independent phylogenetic tests reinforced the picture of pervasive horizontal gene transfer across the RdhA family, with the strongest discordance concentrated in the canonical respiratory subset. Duplication-transfer-loss reconciliation, a computational method that models how gene trees diverge from species trees through gene duplication, horizontal transfer, and gene loss, assigned 74 percent of inferred events as transfers. The approximately unbiased, or AU, test rejected the hypothesis that the gene tree matched the species tree, and the normalized Robinson-Foulds distance, a standard measure of topological disagreement between trees, was 0.82 on the full tree, rising to 0.90 when the analysis was restricted to the respiratory motif class. Values approaching 1.0 indicate near-complete discordance, meaning that the evolutionary history of these genes has been substantially reshuffled relative to the histories of the organisms that carry them.

The implications of this partition extend beyond evolutionary curiosity. Environmental scientists increasingly rely on metagenomics to predict whether a contaminated site can naturally attenuate chlorinated pollutants, and the presence of rdhA sequences is often taken as evidence of dechlorination potential. The new results argue that such predictions should not treat all rdhA detections as equivalent. A canonical respiratory rdhA-rdhB locus, especially one flanked by mobility elements, signals a functional capacity for organohalide respiration and a gene that may arrive, spread, or disappear dynamically within a community. A solitary catabolic-like homolog, by contrast, belongs to a broad resident reservoir whose enzymatic activities, substrates, and ecological roles are largely uncharacterized, and whose persistence within lineages suggests a more stable, possibly housekeeping-like or broadly catabolic role that has yet to be pinned down experimentally.

Tandem arrays add a third dimension to the model. The authors found that these multi-copy arrangements are associated mainly with within-lineage expansion, meaning that duplicated dehalogenase genes tend to accumulate within a single lineage rather than jumping between distant ones. Such expansions could provide raw material for functional diversification, allowing organisms to broaden the range of halogenated substrates they can process, a phenomenon previously documented in specialized organohalide-respiring bacteria that carry dozens of dehalogenase paralogs. The new survey places that observation in a genome-wide context, suggesting that tandem duplication is a distinct evolutionary channel that operates alongside, but separately from, the horizontal transfer that drives the spread of respiratory loci.

The breadth of the survey is itself notable. Detecting validated rdhA homologs across 36 phyla underscores how deeply halogen-transforming potential is woven into prokaryotic life, extending well beyond the handful of cultured dehalorespiring genera, such as Dehalococcoides and other Chloroflexota members, that have dominated laboratory studies. Most of the homologs in the resident reservoir come from organisms that have never been isolated in culture, and their catalytic diversity hints at a largely unmapped chemical space of natural and anthropogenic halogenated compounds that microbes already possess the tools to transform. As genomic databases continue to grow, the architectural classification established here offers a practical framework for interpreting new detections, distinguishing the mobile respiratory specialists that matter most for bioremediation from the quieter, resident enzymes whose functions await experimental exploration.

Subject of Research: Comparative genomics of reductive dehalogenase homologs and their horizontal transfer across prokaryotes

Article Title: Halogen-transforming potential in prokaryotes partitions into mobile respiratory loci and a broad resident reservoir

Article References: Tan, B., & Ng, C. (2026). Halogen-transforming potential in prokaryotes partitions into mobile respiratory loci and a broad resident reservoir. BMC Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-026-13358-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12864-026-13358-7

Keywords: reductive dehalogenase, organohalide respiration, horizontal gene transfer, comparative genomics, GTDB, phylogenomics, mobile genetic elements, microbial ecology, bioremediation, RdhA, RdhB, dechlorination

The technical achievement at the heart of the study is considerable. Building a truly complete genome has long been one of genomics’ most stubborn challenges, because repetitive DNA sequences near the centers and ends of chromosomes resist standard sequencing methods. The research team overcame this by combining PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing, which produces highly accurate reads spanning tens of thousands of DNA letters, with Hi-C technology, which captures the physical contacts between distant stretches of chromosomes and allows the sequences to be anchored into their correct chromosomal positions. The final assembly spans 2.42 gigabases, with a scaffold N50 of 72.35 megabases and a contig N50 of 66.56 megabases, meaning that half of the assembled genome resides in stretches longer than those figures. The guanine-cytosine content of the assembly sits at 42.36 percent. In practical terms, the contiguity of this assembly approaches the ideal of a single gap-free sequence per chromosome, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the bear’s genome architecture.

With that high-resolution reference in hand, the team turned to comparative genomics, aligning the Tibetan brown bear’s chromosomes against those of its closest living relative, the polar bear. The analysis revealed high chromosomal synteny between the two species, meaning that large blocks of genes retain the same order and orientation across both genomes despite millions of years of separate evolution. This structural conservation is scientifically valuable for two reasons. It confirms that the assembly is accurate, since genuine chromosome-scale structure should be preserved between closely related ursids, and it provides a stable framework for pinpointing the regions that have instead diverged, which are precisely the locations where adaptation to very different environments, Arctic sea ice versus high-altitude steppe, is most likely to leave its mark.

The genomic record also preserves a vivid portrait of the species’ demographic turbulence. By reconstructing changes in effective population size through time, the researchers found that the Tibetan brown bear expanded during the early Pleistocene, a period of dynamic climate and habitat change. That expansion, however, was followed by two severe population bottlenecks. The first occurred approximately two million years ago, coinciding with the pre-Poyang Glaciation, and the second struck around one hundred thousand years ago during the Last Glacial Period. Together, these crashes reduced the bear’s cumulative effective population size by nearly eighty percent. For a species that today persists only on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, this history of repeated near-collapses carries a sobering message about the genetic fragility that may still lurk beneath its wild, unbroken landscape.

Yet survival through those bottlenecks suggests the species carries more than vulnerability. Enduring glacial cycles on a plateau whose average elevation exceeds 4,000 meters demands a physiology unlike that of lowland relatives, and the most striking discovery of the study concerns exactly that. When the researchers examined candidate hibernation-related pathways, they found that the Tibetan brown bear displays a distinctly carbohydrate-dominated metabolic signature. This stands in sharp contrast to the hibernation strategy documented in North American brown bears, which rely primarily on lipid, or fat-based, metabolism to fuel their long winter dormancy. In other words, two populations of the same widespread species appear to have evolved fundamentally different biochemical approaches to the same survival problem.

The implications of that finding extend well beyond bears. Fat is the standard fuel of hibernation across most studied mammals, because it stores more energy per gram and spares blood sugar during months of fasting. A sugar-first strategy on the Tibetan Plateau hints at selective pressures unique to that environment, where the short growing season, the composition of available foods, and the metabolic demands of life at low oxygen levels may have favored a different balance of carbohydrate and lipid pathways. The authors emphasize that this distinct metabolic adaptation highlights the bear’s unique mechanisms for surviving the extreme plateau environment, and it gives physiologists a natural experiment in alternative hibernation biochemistry encoded within a single species.

For conservation biologists, the new genome arrives at a critical moment. The Tibetan brown bear sits at the top of the plateau’s food web, playing a crucial ecological role, yet high-quality genomic resources for the species have been scarce until now. A chromosome-level reference genome transforms what conservation managers can do: it enables accurate estimates of genetic diversity and inbreeding, allows the tracking of gene flow between populations, and provides the resolution needed to identify locally adapted lineages that deserve special protection. Given the roughly eighty percent historical reduction in effective population size documented in the study, such tools are not a luxury. They are the baseline data upon which any serious plan for the species’ long-term management on the plateau must rest.

The study also strengthens the broader evolutionary picture of the bear family. Ursids have long fascinated evolutionary biologists because the family contains species with radically different ecologies, from the omnivorous brown bear to the hypercarnivorous, ice-bound polar bear. A near telomere-to-telomere assembly for the Tibetan brown bear adds a critical high-quality data point for reconstructing the phylogenomic relationships within Ursus and for dating the divergences that produced today’s brown bear lineages. Because structural variants, gene duplications, and regulatory regions can now be examined in their full chromosomal context rather than through fragmented assemblies, questions about how bears colonized and adapted to some of Earth’s harshest habitats can be addressed with far greater precision than before.

The research was carried out by Muran Zhao, Anmin Wang, Hai Liu, Chenxing Yu, Yanlin Liu, Nan Sun, and Guogang Li of Qinghai Normal University, with fieldwork, sample collection, and laboratory analysis conducted under permits granted by the university. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The team notes that the new assembly is intended as a resource for the wider community, facilitating future studies of ursid evolutionary history and supporting conservation and management of the plateau’s wildlife. Because the genome is derived from a female bear, it also enables improved analysis of the sex chromosomes, an area where earlier fragmented assemblies often fell short.

What began as a technical sequencing project has ended with a discovery that may echo well beyond the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau. If a close relative of the brown bears studied across North America and Eurasia can hibernate on a carbohydrate-dominated metabolic program, then hibernation is not a single fixed solution that evolution produced once and reused everywhere. It is a flexible toolkit, and different populations have assembled it from different parts. As climate change alters the length and severity of winters across the world’s mountains, understanding that flexibility, and the genes that underpin it, could prove essential not only for protecting the Tibetan brown bear but for predicting which hibernating species can adjust and which cannot. The near-complete genome of this high-altitude survivor is now available as the roadmap for answering those questions.

Subject of Research: Chromosome-level genome assembly and hibernation-related evolution of the Tibetan brown bear (Ursus arctos pruinosus)

Article Title: Near telomere-to-telomere genome reveals the phylogenomics and hibernation-related evolution in Tibetan brown bear (Ursus arctos pruinosus)

Article References: Zhao, M., Wang, A., Liu, H., Yu, C., Liu, Y., Sun, N., & Li, G. (2026). Near telomere-to-telomere genome reveals the phylogenomics and hibernation-related evolution in Tibetan brown bear (Ursus arctos pruinosus). BMC Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-026-13324-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12864-026-13324-3

Keywords: Tibetan brown bear, telomere-to-telomere genome, genomics, hibernation, Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, population bottlenecks, PacBio HiFi, Hi-C sequencing, phylogenomics, conservation genomics, carbohydrate metabolism, Ursidae evolution

In research published in BMC Genomics, Tomasz Grzyb, Małgorzata Wlaźlak and Justyna Szulc took six bacterial strains isolated from soils in post-maize cultivation fields and subjected them to a battery of genome-based species assignment methods. Their targets belonged to the order Caryophanales, a group that includes the enormously consequential genera Bacillus, Priestia and Paenibacillus, organisms used in agriculture, industry and biotechnology, and close relatives of dangerous pathogens. What they found was a taxonomic landscape riddled with contradiction: species boundaries that shift depending on which metric you trust, genomes that intermix across supposedly distinct species names, and a widely used identity threshold that may be significantly miscalibrated.

The team compared several complementary approaches. Average Nucleotide Identity, or ANI, was computed with two different tools, FastANI and skani, which estimate the overall similarity between two genomes by aligning shared DNA sequence. Digital DNA-DNA hybridization, dDDH, a computational descendant of the wet-laboratory hybridization experiments that once defined bacterial species, was calculated using formula 2. The researchers also employed tetranucleotide Z-score distance, TZMD, which measures differences in short-word DNA composition, and single-copy gene phylogenomics, reconstructing evolutionary trees from sets of genes present exactly once in each genome. Crucially, rather than comparing each strain against only its nearest named neighbors, the authors performed comprehensive pairwise comparisons among all available RefSeq genomes at both complete and chromosome assembly levels for each taxonomic neighborhood, an unusually thorough sweep designed to reveal the true structure of variation around each strain.

For two of the six strains, the answer came back clean. Both could be assigned without ambiguity, one to Bacillus subtilis and one to Bacillus licheniformis, with every ANI comparison against their respective species exceeding the conventional 95 percent threshold and with clear phylogenomic separation from neighboring taxa. These cases show that the classical framework still works when species boundaries are genuinely well separated. The complications began with the remaining four strains, each of which landed in a different taxonomic minefield.

Strain Bac2 fell within the Operational Group Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, and here the analysis documented what the authors call fundamental boundary inconsistency. ANI values measured between recognized species within this group exceeded the ANI values measured among genomes assigned to Bacillus amyloliquefaciens itself. In other words, genomes bearing different species names were more similar to each other than genomes carrying the same name, a direct inversion of what a coherent species concept requires. Single-copy gene phylogenomics confirmed the chaos, revealing extensive intermixing of named species across the tree. A name assigned under these conditions conveys little about evolutionary relatedness.

Strain zielonkawy was assigned to the Bacillus cereus sensu stricto genomospecies, but its placement highlighted a familiar and stubborn problem: the deep intermixing of Bacillus cereus sensu stricto and Bacillus thuringiensis. These two names describe bacteria with dramatically different ecological roles, one an opportunistic pathogen and the other an insecticidal biocontrol agent, yet their genomes remain so entangled that no genomic metric reliably separates them. The new data add one more well-documented instance to a debate that has persisted since whole genomes first became available.

The two remaining strains, assigned to Priestia megaterium and Paenibacillus amylolyticus, produced perhaps the most novel findings. Both ANI multi-comparison analysis and single-copy gene phylogenomics suggested possible species intermixing or mislabelling within the public reference databases themselves. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to quantitatively document species delimitation problems between Priestia megaterium and Priestia aryabhattai, and between Paenibacillus amylolyticus and Paenibacillus xylanexedens. The Paenibacillus analysis carried the caveat of a small available sample size, but the Priestia result points to a quietly widespread issue: reference databases, which thousands of labs treat as ground truth, may contain genomes whose species labels do not survive close genomic scrutiny.

Beyond the individual assignments, the study delivers a quantitative contribution to the methodology of bacterial taxonomy itself. Concordance analysis between FastANI and dDDH formula 2 revealed a non-linear relationship, well described by a quadratic fit with an R-squared of 0.991. From this relationship, the researchers derived a striking number: the traditional 70 percent dDDH species threshold, inherited from the pre-genomic era of DNA reassociation experiments, corresponds not to the conventionally assumed 95 percent ANI but to approximately 96.16 percent ANI. In practical terms, dDDH formula 2 is the more conservative of the two metrics, meaning that genomes judged to be the same species by the 95 percent ANI rule could still fail the dDDH test. Laboratories relying on ANI alone may be lumping together organisms that a stricter standard would split.

The comparison between alignment-free and tree-based approaches added further nuance. Correlations between skani genomic distances and single-copy gene phylogenomic patristic distances, the branch-length distances separating genomes on the reconstructed trees, were high across all datasets, with R-squared values ranging from 0.900 to 0.997. Overall genomic structure, in other words, is consistent between methods. But Spearman rank correlations, while still strong, were consistently lower, at 0.780 to 0.916, indicating that the precise identity of a genome’s closest neighbors can shift depending on whether you measure raw sequence similarity or reconstructed evolutionary distance. For taxonomists deciding whether a strain belongs to one species or its nearest rival, that rank-order disagreement is exactly where decisions get made.

As a constructive response, the authors propose a complementary diagnostic tool: within- and between-species ANI multi-comparison analysis paired with PERMANOVA, a non-parametric statistical test for differences among groups, followed by post-hoc pairwise testing. The idea is to treat species boundaries not as a single threshold but as a statistical question: do the ANI distributions within a named species differ significantly from the distributions between it and its relatives? Applied alongside single-copy gene phylogenomics, this framework could flag boundary inconsistencies that single-threshold assignment silently passes over, giving taxonomists an explicit, reproducible way to test whether a species name still carves nature at its joints.

The broader significance of the work extends well beyond six soil isolates from Polish maize fields. The Caryophanales taxa examined here anchor industries from probiotics to pest control and include the closest relatives of the anthrax bacillus. If species boundaries in these groups are inconsistent, then everything built on top of those names, from safety assessments of biocontrol strains to regulatory definitions of pathogenic species, inherits the uncertainty. The study also lands amid an ongoing, sometimes contentious community effort to redefine prokaryotic species entirely, with competing proposals for genome-based circumscriptions. By showing that even gold-standard tools disagree at the margins, and that the canonical thresholds themselves encode hidden conservatism, the Lodz team’s results argue for pluralism: no single number can settle species questions in difficult groups, but a disciplined combination of metrics, statistics and phylogenetics can at least make the disagreements visible, quantifiable and, ultimately, resolvable.

Subject of Research: Genome-based species delimitation and taxonomic boundary evaluation in Caryophanales bacteria using ANI, dDDH and phylogenomics

Article Title: Challenges in Caryophanales species delimitation: comparative evaluation of genomic similarity metrics and phylogenomics based on six environmental strains

Article References: Grzyb, T., Wlaźlak, M., & Szulc, J. (2026). Challenges in Caryophanales species delimitation: comparative evaluation of genomic similarity metrics and phylogenomics based on six environmental strains. BMC Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-026-13320-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12864-026-13320-7

Keywords: Caryophanales, species delimitation, phylogenomics, Average Nucleotide Identity, digital DNA-DNA hybridization, Bacillus subtilis group, Bacillus cereus group, Priestia, Paenibacillus, bacterial taxonomy, BMC Genomics, environmental strains