Name: Gracilicutes Gibbons and Murray 1978 (Approved Lists 1980)

Category: Division

Proposed as: new division

Etymology: Gra.cil.i.cu’tes. L. masc./fem. adj. gracilis, thin; L. fem. n. cutis, skin; N.L. fem. pl. n. Gracilicutes, division with thinner cell walls, implying a gram-negative type of cell wall (name not derived from the name of a genus)

Type class: Photobacteria Gibbons and Murray 1978 (Approved Lists 1980)

Effective publication: Gibbons NE, Murray RGE. Proposals Concerning the Higher Taxa of Bacteria. International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology 1978; 28:1-6.

IJSEM list: Skerman VBD, McGowan V, Sneath PHA. Approved lists of bacterial names. Int J Syst Bacteriol 1980; 30:225-420.

Nomenclatural status: validly published under the ICNP, rejected name

Taxonomic status: not in use

• Notes:
  • 🧕 Gibbons and Murray (1978) assigned this division to the kingdom "Procaryotae" Murray 1968. Publication: Gibbons NE, Murray RGE. Proposals Concerning the Higher Taxa of Bacteria. International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology 1978; 28:1-6.
  • 🧒 Gibbons and Murray (1978) assigned the class Photobacteria Gibbons and Murray 1978 (Approved Lists 1980) to this division. Publication: Gibbons NE, Murray RGE. Proposals Concerning the Higher Taxa of Bacteria. International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology 1978; 28:1-6.
  • 🧒 Gibbons and Murray (1978) assigned the class Scotobacteria Gibbons and Murray 1978 (Approved Lists 1980) to this division. Publication: Gibbons NE, Murray RGE. Proposals Concerning the Higher Taxa of Bacteria. International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology 1978; 28:1-6.
  • 🧒 Murray (1984) assigned the class Anoxyphotobacteria (Gibbons and Murray 1978) Murray 1988 to this division. Publication: Murray RGE. The higher taxa, or, a place for everything..? In: Krieg NR, Holt JG (eds), Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology, first edition, vol. 1, The Williams & Wilkins Co., Baltimore, 1984, p. 31-34.
  • 🧒 Murray (1984) assigned the class Oxyphotobacteria (ex Gibbons and Murray 1978) Murray 1988 to this division. Publication: Murray RGE. The higher taxa, or, a place for everything..? In: Krieg NR, Holt JG (eds), Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology, first edition, vol. 1, The Williams & Wilkins Co., Baltimore, 1984, p. 31-34.
  • 🙄 This taxon name is occasionally misprinted (or affected by an OCR error) in some sources as: "Gracillicutes".
  • 😴 The taxonomic category of this name is not currently in use in the LPSN hierarchy. For this reason, this name does not have a parent taxon and does not have child taxa.
  • 🧍 Rejected name (Opinion 129). The nomenclature of Gracilicutes is unusual because the name was included in the Approved Lists of Bacterial Names (Skerman et al. 1980) although the given taxonomic category, division, had already been removed from the revision of the ICNB (now ICNP) in effect at that time. Thus, the inclusion in the Approved Lists appears to be a mistake. If one regarded the name as validly published in accordance with Rule 24a of the ICNP, it would be illegitimate because of the deviating category. However, according to General Consideration 7 one of the central tasks of nomenclature is to define the terms used to denote the taxonomic categories and their relative ranks. For this reason, a validly published name with a category not included in the ICNB/ICNP is an extreme case. Thus, the name Gracilicutes could also be treated as not being validly published. Notable, when the phylum category was introduced into the ICNP in 2021, a clause that equalized phylum and division was not included. For this reason, Gracilicutes is still affected by being proposed with the wrong category. LPSN regards division and phylum as categories of the same rank, but, for the purpose of assessing the status of a taxon, name the ICNP itself would need to define division and phylum as being synonymous. Notably, if Gracilicutes was validly published at the rank of phylum it would still be illegitimate because it lacks a nomenclatural type and because the formation of the name contravenes Rule 8. The name Gracilicutes corrig. is not derived from the stem of the name of the type genus, but this is enforced by Rule 8 without the possibility to make an exception. Publication: Arahal et al. Judicial Opinion No. 129. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 2024; 74:6064.

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Record number: 904