Candidatus is a term in the taxonomy (scientific classification) of bacteria.

It is a label put before the name of a bacterium which cannot be grown on an agar plate or in any other bacteriology culture. An example would be "Candidatus Phytoplasma allocasuarinae". Candidatus status may be used when a species or genus is well studied but cannot be cultured. Nowadays much information is got by 16S ribosomal RNA sequence analysis. view more...