The Bacillus thuringiensis delta-endotoxin nomenclature committee was set up in 1993 in order to update the nomenclature originally devised in 1989 by Hofte and Whiteley (Microbiological Reviews 53:242-255) and consists of the following committee members.
The current nomenclature, based solely on amino acid identity, allows closely
related toxins to be ranked together and removes the necessity for researchers
to bioassay each new toxin against a growing series of organisms. Biological
specificity being a component of the orginal nomenclature. Roman numerals
have also been exchanged for Arabic numerals in the primary rank (eg CryIIIA
became Cry3A). Each new toxin is assigned a unique name incorporating four
ranks. A completely new toxin might therefore be assigned the name Cry50Aa1.
For the sake of convenience we propose that the use of the quaternary rank
(which distinguishes between toxins that are more than 95% identical) is optional,
only being used for the sake of clarity. Note that quaternary ranks are assigned
to each independently sequenced toxin gene, thus despite the fact that some
toxins have different quaternary ranks - they may in fact be identical.
A nomenclature for the Vip and Vip-related toxins can be found here
A new nomenclature for the sub-class of Bt toxins known as parasporins can be found here
The primary criterion for a toxin to be included in the nomenclature it must:
"have significant sequence similarity to one or more toxins within the nomenclature or be a Bacillus thuringiensis parasporal inclusion protein that exhibits pesticide activity or some experimentally verifiable toxic effect to a target organism"
An exception to the above applies to the recently described series of binary toxins. Crystal proteins can now be included in the nomenclature if together they exhibit a significant toxic effect whereas individually they do not.
There are a number of lists and figures available on this web site, clicking on the following links will open them in separate windows:
| Full toxin list | This lists all toxins within the nomenclature and the relationships between the binary toxin componants |
| Holotype list | This simply lists the holotype toxin for each unique class |
| Three domain dendrogram | This figure shows a dendrogram describing the relatedness of all the toxins believed to share the common three-domain structure |
| Other toxin dendrogram | This figure shows a dendrogram describing the relatedness of the rest of the toxins within the nomenclature and includes related proteins not in the Bt nomenclature |
| Recent news | Is updated whenever a new toxin is added to the nomenclature |
The following review was published in 1998:
Revision of the Nomenclature for the Bacillus thuringiensis Pesticidal Crystal Proteins
N. Crickmore, D.R. Zeigler, J. Feitelson, E. Schnepf, J. Van Rie, D. Lereclus, J. Baum, and D.H. Dean.
Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews (1998) Vol 62: 807-813
It is also available online
Due to the fact that the nomenclature is constantly being updating we also recommend citing this Web Site. The correct format for doing this is:
Crickmore, N., Zeigler, D.R., Schnepf, E., Van Rie, J., Lereclus, D., Baum,
J, Bravo, A. and Dean, D.H. "Bacillus thuringiensis toxin nomenclature"
(2009)
http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/Home/Neil_Crickmore/Bt/
Workers with a newly sequenced toxin are encouraged to submit it to the committee in order that a logical name be assigned to it. Before a toxin can be entered into the nomenclature it's sequence must be made publically available, usually via the EMBL or GenBank databases. We envisage that just prior to publication, or submission to a database, workers will submit their sequence to either Neil Crickmore or Dan Zeigler who will then consult the committee and assign a name to the toxin. This name can then be used in the publication / database submission. Alternatively sequences can be submitted elctronically using this form. We request that both DNA and protein sequences are submitted as this can greatly assist the naming process.
A relational database giving known insecticidal activities of the delta-endotoxins.
Maintained by
Kees Van Frankenhuyzen and Carl
Nystrom it can be found here
These pages maintained by Neil Crickmore