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What's in a name? Class distinction for bacteriocins

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 4, page 160 (2006)Cite this article

A Correspondence to this article was published on 01 February 2006

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In their review, Cotter et al.1 have provided an excellent account of contemporary research into bacteriocins of food-grade lactic acid bacteria (LAB). The bacteriocin subset of the antibiotics have been defined as those 'ribosomally encoded proteinaceous molecules released extracellularly by bacteria that inhibit the growth of other bacteria, typically including some that are closely related to the producing bacterium and to which the producer cell expresses a degree of specific immunity'2,3,4, Cotter et al. rightfully acknowledge that the term bacteriocin (coined >50 years ago by Jacob et al.5) is a more general descriptor for colicin-like antimicrobials produced by bacteria. However, it is problematic that they then proceed to re-define the bacteriocins as 'heat-stable peptides'1, since most colicins, being heat-labile proteins, would consequently not qualify as 'true' bacteriocins! This clearly fails to properly acknowledge the historical significance of colicins as the prototype bacteriocins. Later, the authors propose a very timely revision of the incumbent 'gold standard', but now outdated, LAB bacteriocin classification scheme devised by Klaenhammer in 1993 (Ref. 6).

So, to redress this apparently unjustifiable 'Class distinction' directed against the Class III colicin-like bacteriocins, we now advance an alternative classification scheme: one that builds upon the foundations of the Klaenhammer scheme and also incorporates aspects of the Cotter proposals, but which differs in that it makes provisions for all currently known antimicrobials that conform to the original 'Jacobian' definition of a bacteriocin.

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Figure 1: Proposed classification scheme for bacteriocins.

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  1. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, P.O. BOX 56, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Nicholas C. K. Heng & John R. Tagg

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  1. Nicholas C. K. Heng
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  2. John R. Tagg
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Correspondence to John R. Tagg.

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Heng, N., Tagg, J. What's in a name? Class distinction for bacteriocins. Nat Rev Microbiol 4, 160 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1273-c1

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