New bacterium named in honor of Fred Hutch

It takes a lot of information to officially name a bacterium. Researchers start with the barcode and a comparison to known species. Then they have to detail its lab growing conditions. Its structure and appearance. Its position in the bacterial family tree. What it likes to eat. Its metabolic byproducts. Which antibiotics it’s susceptible to. Then, they work with scientific naming experts to make sure the potential name follows scientific conventions and rules of Latin grammar, and publish in the particular scientific journal that gives the new name its imprimatur.  

Fitting all this information into a paper officially naming M. hutchinsoni and its two new sisters — M. lornae and M. vaginalis — took the authors 14 pages, plus a supplement. 

“It is an incredibly laborious process to put this together, and it’s just not an easy paper to write, but it is essential for moving the field forward,” Fredricks said. 

Before this week, M. hutchinsoni was known as “Megasphaera species  type 2,” first identified and linked to BV by Fredricks’ team using older genetic techniques in a landmark survey of vaginal bacteria they published in 2005. In subsequent work with women in several African countries, the researchers found the species’ DNA barcode in about a third of their participants and linked it to HIV acquisition. 

“This is where our motivation came from to name Megasphaera 2 as Megasphaera hutchinsoni,” Srinivasan explained, “given that it was isolated at Fred Hutch and that it was associated with increased risk of HIV acquisition, and so much work is being done at Fred Hutch now with respect to HIV.”  

In addition to many individual research labs that study HIV, Fred Hutch is the headquarters of the world’s largest publicly funded international collaboration carrying out clinical trials of potential new HIV vaccines and of a consortium aiming to cure HIV with cell and gene therapy. For their part, Srinivasan and Fredricks hope to conduct studies to understand how M. hutchinsoni increases HIV risk, with an eye toward developing new methods to manipulate these bacteria to slow the virus’s spread. 

While their searches have turned up a few living things named after other Hutchinsons — including a couple of scientists and an island — the research team hasn’t been able to identify any other organisms named after Fred Hutch the research center.