Introduction
The genus Brevibacterium was established by Breed (1953), with B. linens as the type species, for a number of Gram-positive, short, unbranching, rod-shaped bacteria formerly classified in the genus Bacterium. Owing to the poor delimitation of the genus, it soon became a repository for a broad range of organisms with very diverse chemical, biochemical and physiological features. Taxonomic studies, in particular those based on cellular chemical analyses, demonstrated the extreme heterogeneity of the genus and resulted in the reclassification of many Brevibacterium species in other coryneform genera (including Arthrobacter, Aureobacterium, Corynebacterium, Curtobacterium, Exiguobacterium, Microbacterium, Nocardioides, Oerskovia and Rhodococcus; see Jones and Keddie, 1985). The description of the genus was subsequently tightened and restricted to the species Brevibacterium linens and B. iodinum (formerly Chromobacterium iodinum; Collins et al., 1980). In addition to B. linens...
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Collins, M.D. (2006). The Genus Brevibacterium. In: Dworkin, M., Falkow, S., Rosenberg, E., Schleifer, KH., Stackebrandt, E. (eds) The Prokaryotes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30743-5_42
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