Abstract
Minute 3. Minutes of the previous meeting.
The minutes of the meeting that was held on 18 August 1999 in Sydney, Australia, had been circulated by email, approved and published [Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 50 (2000), 1409].
Minute 4. Minimal standards.
The Chairman tabled a paper outlining the slow gestation of minimal standards for the description of new taxa of Bacillus and related organisms and its ultimate miscarriage. He explained why the drafts of minimal standards that members had commented upon over the last few years had not been brought to readiness for publication, and reported that the previous Chairman of the subcommittee had recently passed all minimal standards documents in his possession to himself, the new Chairman, so that a fresh start was now both possible and desirable. There ensued considerable discussion, led by H.-J. Busse, on the urgent need for minimal standards, and the nature of the standards required; he indicated that the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) had recommended the minimal standards prepared for the Flavobacteriaceae [Bernardet et al., Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 52 (2002), 10491070] as a good model. The purpose and application of minimal standards was raised, and it was explained by H.-J. Busse that it was the policy of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) to follow standards where they exist for papers submitted to that journal. Application of these standards to proposals published elsewhere, when compiling validation lists, was not appropriate, and the only control is the Bacteriological Code. It was agreed that minimal standards would address both the genus and species levels for aerobic endospore-forming bacteria. N. A. Logan and H.-J. Busse agreed that they would, with the help of other subcommittee members, generate a key-word list with indications of which characters suggested for inclusion in minimal standards should be regarded as essential, and which as useful.