Book of names: newly discovered microbes must first be recorded in the IJSEM

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL of Systematic Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) is not, perhaps, everyone's first choice for bedtime reading. It's a desiccated scientific publication without a trace of glamour or rhetorical flourish, a sobriety which reflects its official role as an accreditor of scientific research.

Since its first issue in 1951, the IJSEM has been the microbial world's official record book. For a new bacterium to be recognised its name must be recorded in the IJSEM, which is the sole official international forum for the publication of new bacterial species names. The journal publishes research papers describing and naming almost all newly discovered bacteria; the names of newly discovered bacteria published in other journals are not valid until they have been checked and published in IJSEM. The journal has officially validated the names of 9,263 species and genera since 1980.

For the world's microbiologists and science historians, the now completed digitisation of the IJSEM's entire archive is of real significance. With research into microbes, from disease-causing bacteria to cloud-forming plankton, progressing at an ever increasing rate, the ability to immediately reference previous discoveries online will save precious library hours – and could throw up many interesting lines of enquiry. All issues of the journal dating back to volume 1, 1951, totalling over 25000 pages, have been scanned and made available as .pdf files.

Dr Ron Fraser, Chief Executive of the SGM, commented: "This large project is a significant event in the history of microbial classification. It will greatly benefit the scientific community to have this archive freely available worldwide."

IJSEM's importance is illustrated by its role in this year's big microbiology news story: the announcement, by scientists at the Venter Institute in California, of the first synthetic genome of a bacterium, dubbed Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0. The genesis of Mycoplasma  can be traced back to the work of earlier microbiologists, and to the publication of their findings in the IJSEM.

In the early 1980s, Dr Joseph G. Tully National Institutes of Health in Maryland, USA, was working on an unidentified bacterium. "It was difficult to culture the bacterium and it took us some time to get to the point at which we could satisfactorily recover it from human tissue material," recalls Tully. "Our subsequent work indicated the organism was pathogenic and was involved in sexually transmitted infections." Dr Tully and his colleagues published their findings in the IJSEM (then called the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology) and Mycoplasma genitalium was officially named in 1983. Tully's IJSEM paper was the point of departure for the Venter Institute scientists in their quest to develop synthetic life.

Other important discoveries first published in IJSEM include Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease and the hospital superbug Acinetobacter baumanii. The archive includes hundreds of species descriptions and many seminal articles in prokaryotic systematics and taxonomy that have never been available online before in full text.