About the Authors

Nikos C. Kyrpides

nckyrpides@lbl.gov (NCK); Hans-Peter.Klenk@dsmz.de (HPK)

Affiliations DOE-Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, California, United States of America, Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Philip Hugenholtz

Affiliation Australian Centre for Ecogenomics Research, School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Jonathan A. Eisen

Affiliation University of California, Davis, Davis, California, United States of America

Tanja Woyke

Affiliation DOE-Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, California, United States of America

Markus Göker

Affiliation DSMZ - German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, Braunschweig, Germany

Charles T. Parker

Affiliation NamesforLife, LLC, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America

Rudolf Amann

Affiliation Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany

Brian J. Beck

Affiliation American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), Manassas, Virginia, United States of America

Patrick S. G. Chain

Affiliation Los Alamos National Laboratory, Bioscience Division, Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States of America

Jongsik Chun

Affiliation School of Biological Sciences and Chunlab Inc., Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

Rita R. Colwell

Affiliations University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland, United States of America, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Antoine Danchin

Affiliation AMAbiotics SAS, Genopole, Evry, France

Peter Dawyndt

Affiliation Ghent University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Ghent, Belgium

Tom Dedeurwaerdere

Affiliation Centre for Philosophy of Law, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Edward F. DeLong

Affiliation Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

John C. Detter

Affiliation Los Alamos National Laboratory, Bioscience Division, Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States of America

Paul De Vos

Affiliations Ghent University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Ghent, Belgium, Ghent University, BCCM/LMG Bacteria collection, Laboratory of Microbiology, Ghent, Belgium

Timothy J. Donohue

Affiliation University of Wisconsin-Madison, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America

Xiu-Zhu Dong

Affiliation Bioresource Center (BRC) of Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. R. China

Dusko S. Ehrlich

Affiliation Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Jouy en Josas, France

Claire Fraser

Affiliation Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Richard Gibbs

Affiliation Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America

Jack Gilbert

Affiliation Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, United States of America

Paul Gilna

Affiliation BioEnergy Science Center (BESC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Knoxville, Tennessee, United States of America

Frank Oliver Glöckner

Affiliations Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany, Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH, Bremen, Germany

Janet K. Jansson

Affiliation Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America

Jay D. Keasling

Affiliations Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America, Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), Berkeley, California, United States of America

Rob Knight

Affiliation Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America

David Labeda

Affiliation ARS, USDA, National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research, Peoria, Illinois, United States of America

Alla Lapidus

Affiliations Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia, Algorithmic Biology Lab, St. Petersburg Academic University, St. Petersburg, Russia

Jung-Sook Lee

Affiliation Korean Collection for Type Cultures (KCTC), Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB), 111 Gwahangno, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Korea

Wen-Jun Li

Affiliation The Key Laboratory for Microbial Resources of the Ministry of Education, Kunming, People's Republic of China

Juncai MA

Affiliation China General Microbiological Culture Collection Center (CGMCC), Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China

Victor Markowitz

Affiliations DOE-Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, California, United States of America, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America

Edward R. B. Moore

Affiliation CCUG - Culture Collection University of Gothenburg, Sahlgrenska Academy of the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Mark Morrison

Affiliation Diamantina Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia

Folker Meyer

Affiliation Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, United States of America

Karen E. Nelson

Affiliation The J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, Maryland, United States of America

Moriya Ohkuma

Affiliation Riken Bioresource Center, Japan Collection of Microorganisms, Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama, Japan

Christos A. Ouzounis

Affiliations Chemical Process & Energy Resources Institute, Centre for Research & Technology, Thessalonica, Greece, Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Norman Pace

Affiliation Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America

Julian Parkhill

Affiliation The Pathogen Genomics, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Nan Qin

Affiliation State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Disease, The First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Ramon Rossello-Mora

Affiliation Institut Mediterrani d'Estudis Avançats (IMEDEA, CSIC-UIB), Esporles, Illes Balears, Spain

Johannes Sikorski

Affiliation DSMZ - German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, Braunschweig, Germany

David Smith

Affiliation CABI, Bakeham Lane, Egham, Surrey, United Kingdom

Mitch Sogin

Affiliation Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Evolution and Molecular Biology, MBL, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States of America

Rick Stevens

Affiliation Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, United States of America

Uli Stingl

Affiliation Red Sea Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Ken-ichiro Suzuki

Affiliation NITE Biological Resource Center (NBRC), Kisarazu-shi, Chiba, Japan

Dorothea Taylor

Affiliation NamesforLife, LLC, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America

Jim M. Tiedje

Affiliation Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America

Brian Tindall

Affiliation DSMZ - German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, Braunschweig, Germany

Michael Wagner

Affiliation Department of Microbial Ecology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

George Weinstock

Affiliation The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, Farmington, Connecticut

Jean Weissenbach

Affiliation Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA), Genoscope, Evry, France

Owen White

Affiliation Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Jun Wang

Affiliations State Key Laboratory for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Disease, The First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Lixin Zhang

Affiliations Bioresource Center (BRC) of Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. R. China, Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China

Yu-Guang Zhou

Affiliation China General Microbiological Culture Collection Center (CGMCC), Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China

Dawn Field

Affiliation U.K. Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Environmental Bioinformatics Centre, Oxford, United Kingdom

William B. Whitman

Affiliation Department of Microbiology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States of America

George M. Garrity

Affiliations NamesforLife, LLC, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America

Hans-Peter Klenk

nckyrpides@lbl.gov (NCK); Hans-Peter.Klenk@dsmz.de (HPK)

Affiliation DSMZ - German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, Braunschweig, Germany

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.