Table 1.

Significant advancements in prokaryotic systematics.

Year	Name of event	Significance	References
1684	First observation of bacterial cells by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek	Origin of phenotype-based microbial taxonomy	[12]
1773–1786	Introduction of the first bacterial description by O.F. Müller	Introduction of morphological descriptions	[17,29,30]
1809	Nomination of Polyangium vitellinum by Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link	Beginning of nomenclature of bacterial species	[31]
1875	Purification of Bacillus anthracis by Robert Koch	Beginning of the pure-culture based bacteriology	[58]
1875	Attempt to establish formal rules for microbial nomenclature by Ferdinand Cohn	First attempt at formal microbial nomenclature	[69]
1896	First report and description of bacterial genera by K.B. Lehman and R. Neumann	The first report of bacterial genera	[32]
1901	The first manual of bacterial taxonomy was published by Professor Frederick Dixon Chester	Publication of the first handbook of bacterial taxonomy	[70]
1923	Bergey's Manual was published by the American bacteriologist, David Hendricks Bergey and American Society for Microbiology members	The birth of Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology	[8]
1977	Archaea were first classified as a separate group of prokaryotes based on phylogenies derived from 16S rRNA catalogs	The birth of the three-domain system and rRNA-based taxonomy	[13]
1984	Introduction of culture-independent studies of prokaryotic diversity in natural environments based on rRNA	The birth of the culture-independent study of prokaryotic diversity	[5]
1977–2000	Inclusion of DNA-DNA hybridization, GC content analysis	Beginning of the genome-based taxonomy of prokaryotes	[40–43]
2000–2023	Inclusion of dDDH, ANI, core/conserved gene-based phylogenetics, AAI, POCP, MALDI-TOF-MS	Comprehensive phenotype, genotype and protein-based taxonomy of prokaryotes	[47,49–55,67,71–74]