Table 3.

Eponyms and etymological comments for some common microorganisms.

S. No.	Microbial nomenclature	Name of Scientist/ Person	Comment
1	C. fruendii	A. Freund	The species name was credited to microbiologist A. Freund who first discovered the fermentation product trimethylene glycol
2	Salmonella	Daniel Elmer Salmon	Salmonella was named after USA veterinary doctor Daniel Elmer Salmon for his services in veterinary microbiology. His research assistant Theobald Smith in 1885, first isolated Salmonella choleraesuis.
3	Burkholderia	Walter Burkholder	Walter Burkholder, a USA plant pathologist, isolated an organism from onion bulb rot disease in 1950, which he named Pseudomonas cepacia, that later was named Burkholderia cepacia.
4	Acinetobacter baumannii	Prof. Paul and Linda Baumann	Prof. Paul and his wife Linda Baumann first isolated the bacterium in 1968, now called Acinetobacter baumannii.
5	Bordetella	Jules Bordet	A Belgium immunologist Jules Bordet and his brother-in-law Octave Gengou successfully isolated the bacterium in 1906 from the sputum specimen of his son suffering from whooping cough.
6	Neisseria	Albert Ludwig Sigesmund Neisser	A German physician working as a dermatologist discovered the causative agent of gonorrhea in 1879. Also, he co-discovered the agent of Leprosy with Gerhard Armauer Hansen
7	Gardnerella	Hermann L. Gardner	An American bacteriologist isolated this bacterium in 1955 from vaginal samples of women suffering from vaginitis. He named it Hemophilus vaginalis which was later changed to Gardnerella vaginalis in his honor in 1984
8	Borrelia burgdorferi	Amédée Borrel & Willy Burgdorfer	Dr. Willy Burgdorfer, an American zoologist/ microbiologist, identified spirochetes in Ixodes ticks and established the cause of Lyme disease in 1982. Amédée Borrel was a French cytopathologist who studied spirochetes and wrote papers on their classification based on morphology. A Dutch bacteriologist named the borrelia genus in 1907 for Amédée Borrel’s work on the classification of spirochetes
9	Rickettsia prowazekii	Howard Tayler Ricketts, Stanislaus von Prowazek	A Brazilian microbiologist da Rocha-Lima in his publication in 1916, used the term Rickettsia prowazekii to honor the work of American pathologist Howard Taylor Ricketts who died of typhus in 1910 while doing his research, and his colleague Stanislaus von Prowazek who also died of epidemic typhus in 1915 while studying typhus outbreak in Germany prison hospital.
10	Coxiella burnetii	H.R. Cox, Frank MacFarlane Burnet	Australian virologist Frank MacFarlane Burnet worked on this organism and contracted the illness. He isolated this organism from a patient in 1937, while H.R. Cox, an American bacteriologist, isolated this organism from ticks in 1938.
11	Epstein-Barr virus	Michael A. Epstein & Y. M. Barr	Michael Anthony Epstein-a British pathologist isolated and grew a virus on cell lines with his Irish coworker Yvonne Barr in 1963 from a sample of a patient with Burkitt lymphoma from Uganda
12	BK virus	A Sudanese patient	The initials of a 29-year-old patient from which the virus was first isolated in 1971
13	JC virus	John Cunningham	The virus was isolated from John Cunningham, suffering from progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy
14	Sporothrix schenkii	Benjamin Schenck	An American medical student at John Hopkins hospital isolated fungus from a patient’s hand in 1896
15	Pneumocystis jirovecii	Prof. Otto Jirovec	A Czechoslovak scientist who, in 1953, first discovered this organism as a cause of pulmonary disease.
16	Giardia lamblia	Prof. A. Giard & Dr. F. Lambl	Prof. A. Giard was a French biologist who, in 1882, described flagellated protozoa as the cause of common diarrheal illness. Vilém Dušan Lambl was a Czech physician who, in 1859, first published the microscopic drawing of this parasite from the stool sample of a child.
17	Leishmania donovani	Sir W.B. Leishman & Charles Donovan	A British Royal Army Pathologist, Sir W.B. Leishman, in 1903, while examining spleen specimens of kala-azar patients in India, found oval bodies of protozoa. Similar protozoal structures were also described independently by Charles Donovan in kala-azar patients in India.
18	Naegleria fowleri	F.P.O. Nägler & Malcolm Fowler	Austrian bacteriologist F.P.O. Nägler first described the life cycle of amoeba passing through the flagellate form. An Australian physician Malcolm Fowler in 1970, first isolated the microbe from the brain tissue of a patient with encephalitis.
19	Schistosoma mansoni	Sir Patrick Manson	A Scottish physician is credited with describing many infectious parasitic diseases, namely Mansonella perstans, Mansonella ozzardi, Schistosoma mansonii, and many more.