Salmonella carries the name of the boss, not the scientist who found it
In 1885 a research laboratory assistant named Theobald Smith isolated a bacterium he and his supervisor blamed for hog cholera. The supervisor was Daniel Elmer Salmon, and when a new genus name was coined in 1900, it honoured him. The germ turned out to be innocent of hog cholera, but it has plenty of other talents.
Salmonella is a genus of rod-shaped, gram-negative bacteria, roughly 2 to 5 micrometres long, that swim with flagella spread over the whole cell. Karl Eberth first saw the typhoid organism in 1880 in patients' spleens, and Georg Gaffky grew it in pure culture four years later. Smith's discovery came a year after that at the veterinary branch of the American agriculture department, a unit Salmon ran. Joseph Leon Lignières proposed the name Salmonella in 1900.
Classifying it has been a long headache. Early strains were named for the illness they seemed to cause, such as mouse typhoid, then for the places they were isolated. In 1987 Le Minor and Popoff argued on molecular grounds for a single species, and in 1989 Reeves and colleagues revived S. bongori as a second one. Today S. enterica holds six subspecies and over 2,500 serotypes, written with a capital but not italics, as in Salmonella Typhimurium. Even infectious disease specialists often get the names wrong.
In the late 1930s the Australian bacteriologist Nancy Atkinson set up in Adelaide one of only three salmonella typing laboratories then operating anywhere. She described several new strains there, among them Salmonella Adelaide, isolated in 1943.
The bacteria are hard to kill. They shrug off freezing, persist for years in dry foods, and survive in bathrooms for weeks. Heat to 60 degrees Celsius destroys them in 12 minutes, yet inside fatty foods like peanut butter they can withstand 90 degrees for half an hour. Typhoidal types such as Salmonella Typhi live only in humans, while the more common nontyphoidal types pass between people and animals, especially reptiles; S. bongori mostly inhabits cold-blooded creatures. When oxygen runs short, Salmonella can respire using sulfate, nitrate, sulfur or fumarate instead, or simply ferment. A cell divides roughly every 40 minutes.
Source: Salmonella
