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UK Health Security Agency

NCTC Research Highlights: Four Key Publications in 2025 

Scientists from the National Collection of Type Cultures contributed to four journal articles in 2025. The two articles published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology showcased different aspects of NCTC’s contribution to the fields of microbial taxonomy and nomenclature. In the first article¹, former NCTC Data Scientist Jake Turnbull collaborated with teams of scientists from Germany and Switzerland to describe a strain of a novel genus and species, NCTC 14938T Dentiradicibacter hellwigii. Isolated from a secondary root canal infection of a human tooth, NCTC 14938T is a motile, rod-shaped and anaerobic strain belonging to the taxonomic class Betaproteobacteria. In the second², Jake contributed to the report of a Microbiology Society-supported meeting in Glasgow, UK (September 2023) at which he and UKHSA Head of Culture Collections Hannah McGregor both presented. The meeting also led to the formation of the Ad Hoc Committee for Mitigating Changes in Prokaryotic Nomenclature, with the aim of developing a framework leading to a recommended name for end-users of prokaryote nomenclature.  

The NCTC team, led by the industrious Jake, went on to describe the 101 bacterial strains accessioned to the NCTC in 2023³, the third of an annual series of articles to which strain depositors to NCTC are invited to co-author. As with previous years, the newly added strains demonstrate an extensive breadth of taxonomy, host and other properties, with a growing number accompanied by genomic sequence data.  

NCTC’s final publication of the year is the result of a long-standing collaboration with the Wellcome Sanger Institute, along with the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Universities of Oxford and Bath. Long- and short-read genomic sequencing of bacterial strains from the Murray Collection, an historic sub-collection of the NCTC, enabled the comparison of plasmid sequences in the Murray strains – all isolated within the pre-antibiotic era – to their counterparts in more recently isolated strains. Remarkably, the comparison enabled different evolutionary trajectories to be identified, including the observation that a “relatively small group of modern plasmids carry almost all of the AMR genes seen today” 4. As such this study offers valuable information to projects conducting surveillance of bacterial plasmids and the antimicrobial resistance genes they increasingly harbour.  

 

References

  1. Bartsch S, Wittmer A, Weber AK, Neumann-Schaal M, Wolf J, Gronow S, Turnbull JD, Tennert C, Häcker G, Cieplik F & Al-Ahmad A (2025) Dentiradicibacter hellwigii gen. nov., sp. nov., isolated from a secondary infected root canal in the human oral cavity. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology 75(3):006690. https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.006690

  2. Patrick S, Filkins L, Göker M, Holden, N., Hoskisson PA, Kiepas A, Meehan C, Pallen M, Pritchard L, Suchanek AL, Sutcliffe I, Trujillo ME, Tucker N, Turnbull JD & Butler-Wu S (2025) ‘What’s in a name? Fit-for-purpose bacterial nomenclature’: meeting report. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology 75(7):006844. https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.006844

  3. Turnbull JD, Dicks J, Adkin R, Dickinson A, Kaushal D, Semowo M, The NCTC 2023 Depositors Cohort & McGregor H (2025) Notification of bacterial strains made available by the UK National Collection of Type Cultures in 2023. Access Microbiology 7(10):001015. https://doi.org/10.1099/acmi.0.001015.v3

  4. Cazares A, Figueroa W, Cazares D, Lima L, Turnbull JD, McGregor H, Dicks J, Alexander S, Iqbal Z & Thomson NR (2025) Pre- and postantibiotic epoch: The historical spread of antimicrobial resistance. Science 390(6777):eadr1522. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adr1522

December 2025