The genus Methanimicrococcus was described based on the strain PA (ATCC BAA-276; DSM 13328), isolated from the hindgut of a cockroach, Periplaneta americana. The species was initially named Methanomicrococcus blatticola; however, the name was later corrected to Methanimicrococcus blatticola, making it the only genus of methanogens that has -i as a connecting vowel rather than -o in the name.
GENUS
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The genus Methanimicrococcus was described based on the strain PA (ATCC BAA-276; DSM 13328), isolated from the hindgut of a cockroach, Periplaneta americana. The species was initially named Methanomicrococcus blatticola; however, the name was later corrected to Methanimicrococcus blatticola, making it the only genus of methanogens that has -i as a connecting vowel rather than -o in the name.
The cells are irregular cocci with a diameter of 0.7 – 1 μm, occurring singly or in clusters. M. blatticola can only use methylated compounds, such as methanol or methylamines, in combination with H2 to produce methane, which is in sharp contrast to other methanogens from the Methanosarcinales order. Later studies showed a lack of activity for enzymes involved in the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway that reduce CO2 to the methyl group. Genome analysis demonstrated that the highly reduced genome of M. blatticola lacks the upper part of the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway, restricting this methanogen to methylated compounds and H2.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).