Zixibacteria is a bacterial phylum with

candidate A candidate, or nominee, is a prospective recipient of an award or honor, or a person seeking or being considered for some kind of position. For example, one can be a candidate for membership in a group (sociology), group or election to an offic ...

status, meaning it had no cultured representatives. It is a member of the

FCB group The FCB is a proposed Phylum, superphylum of bacteria named after the main member phyla Fibrobacterota, Chlorobiota, and Bacteroidota. The members are considered to form a clade due to a number of conserved signature indels. Cavalier-Smith call ...

Zixibacteria was proposed as a bacterial phylum following the recovery of a genome from representative RBG-1. This genome was recovered using genome-resolved

metagenomics Metagenomics is the study of all genetics, genetic material from all organisms in a particular environment, providing insights into their composition, diversity, and functional potential. Metagenomics has allowed researchers to profile the mic ...

from sediment samples of an aquifer adjacent to the Colorado River (CO, USA) and was suggestive of metabolically versatility, which is presumably requisite for life in a rapidly changing environment such as aquifer sediments Since being proposed as a phylum in 2013, members of the Zixibacteria phylum have been detected in a variety of other environments (sometimes retroactively), including subsurface sediments (WA, USA), estuary water (NC, USA), moonmilk cave deposits (Comblain-au-Pont, Belgium), and deep subsurface fracture fluids from a gold mine (SD, USA)

References

Bacteria phyla Candidatus taxa {{Bacteria-stub