Clostridium is a genus of anaerobic, Gram-positive bacteria. Species of Clostridium inhabit soils and the intestinal tract of animals, including humans. This genus includes several significant human pathogens, including the causative agents of botulism and tetanus. It also formerly included an important cause of diarrhea, Clostridioides difficile, which was reclassified into the Clostridioides genus in 2016. History In the late 1700s, Germany experienced a number of outbreaks of an illness that seemed connected to eating certain sausages. In 1817, the German neurologist Justinus Kerner detected rod-shaped cells in his investigations into this so-called sausage poisoning. In 1897, the Belgian biology professor Emile van Ermengem published his finding of an endospore-forming organism he isolated from spoiled ham. Biologists classified van Ermengem's discovery along with other known gram-positive spore formers in the genus Bacillus. This classification presented problems, however, because the isolate grew only in anaerobic conditions, but Bacillus grew well in oxygen. Circa 1880, in the course of studying fermentation and butyric acid synthesis, a scientist surnamed Prazmowski first assigned a binomial name to Clostridium butyricum. The mechanisms of anaerobic respiration were still not yet well elucidated at that time, so taxonomy of anaerobes was still nascent. In 1924, Ida A. Bengtson separated van Ermengem's microorganisms from the Bacillus group and assigned them to the genus Clostridium. By Bengtson's classification scheme, Clostridium contained all of the anaerobic endospore-forming rod-shaped bacteria, except the genus Desulfotomaculum. Taxonomy As of October 2022, there are 164 validly published species in Clostridium. The genus, as traditionally defined, contains many organisms not closely related to its type species. The issue was originally illustrated in full detail by a rRNA phylogeny from Collins 1994, which split the traditional genus (now corresponding to a large slice of Clostridia) into twenty clusters, with cluster I containing the type species and its close relatives. Over the years, this has resulted in many new genera being split out, with the ultimate goal of constraining Clostridium to cluster I. "Clostridium" cluster XIVa and "Clostridium" cluster IV efficiently ferment plant polysaccharide composing dietary fiber, making them important and abundant taxa in the rumen and the human large intestine. As mentioned before, these clusters are not part of current Clostridium, and use of these terms should be avoided due to ambiguous or inconsistent usage. Biochemistry Species of Clostridium are obligate anaerobe and capable of producing endospores. They generally stain gram-positive, but as well as Bacillus,