CLASSIFICATION OF BACTERIA

Although the bacterial structures are quite simple but their classification is quite difficult. However, due to readily available devices in the field of molecular biology it make the taxonomy much easy.The use of old staining techniques such as Gram's staining for differentiation of bacteria on the basis of cell wall structures, their morphological, biochemical characters for proper characterization were known earlier. The use of molecular biological techniques such as restriction fragment length polymorphism, DNA-DNA hybridization and 16S rRNA sequencing make the studies more easy as far as the phylogeny of the bacterial strains are concerned. As a result there has been a considerable revival of interest in bacterial taxonomy.

The bacterial taxonomy has a rapid and radical change due to involvement of modern molecular biological techniques. This is why it has now refined. Much care has also been taken in ascertaining the history of species so that the species names reflect the original description, rather than a popularly used name.As a result of such activity, the species names assigned to bacteria may change.

The basic constitution of bacterial species is different from higher organism due to the reason that in later forms the species is defined as those which shares many common features and its members breed to produce fertile offspring. While in case of bacteria, they reproduce only asexually by binary fission, hence the above concept does not suit in bacteriology.

The use of computers in bacteriology and in particular taxonomy gave an advantage to resolve the impact of the techniques of numerical taxonomy. This is based on comparing the strains of bacteria for the large number of characters. The more closely related organisms are to have the more characteristics in common. A similarity matrix can be drawn up depicting the degree of relationship between all the species examined and it is then presented in the form of dendogram.