[4] It was first isolated from water of the River Elbe by R.-M. Wittich, after whom the species is named.

[2] The species was originally thought to belong to the genus Sphingomonas, despite poor alignment of its 16S rRNA gene with its putative nearest neighbor.

[5] It has since been reclassified to Rhizorhabdus as part of a larger re-evaluation of Alphaproteobacteria.

[9] Furthermore, this bacterium also grows on dibenzofuran and 4-chloro-dibenzofuran, using them as the sole carbon sources.

[10] Thanks to its wide-ranging metabolic capabilities and likely propensity to acquire novel degradation genes, in no small part due to its wealth of plasmids,[11] The unusual arrangement of its genes involved in dioxin degradation, and the full description of the dioxin degradation pathway, is still under investigation.