Abstract
Bacteroides fragilis,type species of the genus Bacteroides was first described by Veillon and Zuber (1898) as Bacillus fragilis but was later transferred to the genus Bacteroides by Castellani and Chalmers (1919). B. fragilis has been referred to as Fusiformis fragilis (Topley and Wilson, 1929), Ristella fragilis (Prévot, 1938) and Bacteroides fragilis subspecies fragilis (Holdeman and Moore, 1974). Studies on more than 300 morphologically and physiologically similar isolates which were saccharolytic and showed growth stimulation with bile revealed phenotypically discernible groups within a “continum of variants” (Holdeman and Moore, 1970). As a result, Bacteroides fragilis was regarded as a single species which comprised the following; B. fragilis subspecies fragilis, B. fragilis subspecies distasonis, B. fragilis subspecies eggerthii, B. fragilis subspecies ovatus, B. fragilis subspecies thetaiotaomicron, B. fragilis subspecies uniformis,and B. fragilis subspecies vulgatus (Holdeman and Moore, 1974).
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Shah, H.N. (1992). The Genus Bacteroides and Related Taxa. In: Balows, A., Trüper, H.G., Dworkin, M., Harder, W., Schleifer, KH. (eds) The Prokaryotes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2191-1_34
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