Thioploca is a genus of filamentous sulphur-oxidizing bacteria, in the order Thiotrichales (class Gammaproteobacteria). They inhabit both marine and freshwater environments, forming vast communities off the Pacific coast of South America and in other areas with a high organic matter sedimentation and bottom waters rich in nitrate and poor in oxygen. Their cells contain large vacuoles that occupy more than 80% of the cellular volume, used to store nitrate to oxidize sulphur for anaerobic respiration in the absence of oxygen, an important characteristic of the genus. With cell diameters ranging
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via GBIF
Thioploca is a genus of filamentous sulphur-oxidizing bacteria, in the order Thiotrichales (class Gammaproteobacteria). They inhabit both marine and freshwater environments, forming vast communities off the Pacific coast of South America and in other areas with a high organic matter sedimentation and bottom waters rich in nitrate and poor in oxygen. Their cells contain large vacuoles that occupy more than 80% of the cellular volume, used to store nitrate to oxidize sulphur for anaerobic respiration in the absence of oxygen, an important characteristic of the genus. With cell diameters ranging from 15-40 μm, they are some of the largest bacteria known. They provide an important link between the nitrogen and sulphur cycles, because they use both sulfur and nitrogen compounds. They secrete a sheath of mucus which they use as a tunnel to travel between sulphide-containing sediment and nitrate-containing sea water.
== Taxonomy and identification == The genus Thioploca was first described by German botanist Robert Lauterborn in 1907, who discovered them in Lake Constance, Germany. Four species of Thioploca have been validly published (as of 2024): two freshwater species (Thioploca ingrica and Thioploca schmidlei) and two marine species (Thioploca araucae and Thioploca chileae).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).