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What's in a name? Class distinction for bacteriocins

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

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We very much welcome the feedback from our colleagues in bacteriocin research. We focused primarily on food-grade lactic acid bacteriocins and did not specifically address the issue of colicin classification. The colicins are heat-labile proteins and, as such, would not qualify under our definition of bacteriocins as heat-stable peptides, which in our opinion has become the working definition of bacteriocins in most laboratories. We suggest that the 'colicins' represent a distinct class of antimicrobial. It is important to remember that classification schemes are rarely 'right' or 'wrong', but are simply proposals to deal with complexity and to provide a common nomenclature. The only valid measure of a classification scheme is whether more people subscribe to it than not, and this will of course be the case with our proposal. Given that no scheme actually changes the nature of the objects under classification, the same level of heterogeneity has to be accounted for in any proposal. Our objective was to remove this complexity to the sub-class level (of two relatively simply defined classes). We are happy that our proposal is consistent with the principal biological features of these fascinating inhibitors and we refer readers to the original article for our rationale.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microbiology Department, Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Paul D. Cotter & Colin Hill

  2. Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, Moorepark Biotechnology Centre, Teagasc, Cork, Ireland

    R. Paul Ross

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  1. Paul D. Cotter
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  2. Colin Hill
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  3. R. Paul Ross
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Correspondence to Colin Hill.

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Cotter, P., Hill, C. & Ross, R. What's in a name? Class distinction for bacteriocins. Nat Rev Microbiol 4, 160 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1273-c2

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