Clostridium phytofermentans Thomas A Warnick, Barbara A Meth, and Susan B Leschine. Clostridium phytofermentans sp. nov., a cellulolytic mesophile from forest soil. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol July 2002 52:1155-60; . (also called Lachnoclostridium phytofermentans) is an obligately anaerobic rod-shaped spore-forming, Gram-positive bacterium in the family Lachnospiraceae. It is a model organism of interest for its ability to ferment diverse plant polysaccharides Boutard et al. Functional Diversity of Carbohydrate-Active Enzymes Enabling a Bacterium to Ferment Plant Biomass. PLOS Genetics November 2014; . including cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin to ethanol, acetate, and hydrogen. The C. phytofermentans 4.8 Mb genome has been fully sequenced,Petit et al. Genome and transcriptome of Clostridium phytofermentans, catalyst for the direct conversion of plant feedstocks to fuels. PLOS One June 2015; . revealing it contains over 170 enzymes in the CAZy database, though one hydrolase appears to be essential for degrading cellulose.
This species is one of the many phylogenetically-problematic members of Clostridium. Yutin and Galperin proposed in 2013 to move it to its own genus Lachnoclostridium under Lachnospiraceae, but the publication was not validated under the Prokaryotic Code. GTDB concurs with the assignment.
References
External links Type strain of Clostridium phytofermentans at BacDive - the Bacterial Diversity Metadatabase