Characterization of a bacterium isolated from amber

✍ Scribed by Tetsuo Hamamoto; Koki Horikoshi

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 296 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0960-3115
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00114201

✦ Synopsis

A bacterium has been isolated from Baltic amber, after it was soaked in ethanol and flamed. The bacterium was a Gram-positive aerobic spore-forming rod whose 16S rDNA sequence had a 99.6% homology to that of Bacillus subtilis. Accordingly, the bacterium was identified as a strain in the species Bacillus subtilis. Considering the isolation procedure that was employed, the isolate should not be a contaminant of the contemporary Bacillus population; however, it may not be considered as a bacterium trapped when the amber was formed. These results suggest that amber might contain bacteria that were derived from the environments in which the amber had been located.