Other landmarks and discoveries in the field of microbiology are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Synopsis of some milestones in microbiology
| Event | Discoverer | Date |
| Discovery of Petri dish (plate) | Richard Petri | 1887 |
| Discovery of nutrient agar (agar-agar) | Fanny A. Eilshemius & Dr. Walter Hesse | 1881 |
| Release of first edition of Bargey’s Manual | Professor David Bergey | 1923 |
| Discovery of Archaea using rRNA analysis | Carl Woese & George Fox | 1977 |
| Discovery of bacterial conjugation | Edward Tatum & Joshua Lederberg | 1946 |
| Discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) | Luc Montagnier | 1983 |
| Discovery of transposable elements | Barbara McClintock | 1951 |
| Discovery of immunoglobulin structure | Rodney Porter | 1959 |
| First discovery of yellow fever virus | Walter Reed | 1900 |
| Discovery of monoclonal antibodies | Georges Kohler & Cesar Milstein | 1975 |
| Discovery of sulfanilamide & sulpha drugs | Gerhard Domagk | 1935 |
| Proposed germ theory of disease | Friedrich Henle | 1840 |
| Discovery of the ribosomes as sites of protein synthesis | Sydney Brenne, Francois Jacob and Matthew Meselson | 1961 |
| Discovery of streptomycin | Selman Waksman & Albert Schatz | 1943 |
| Discovery of bacteriophages | Frederick Twort | 1915 |
| First cultivation of viruses in cell culture | John Enders | 1946 |
| Discovery of diphtheria antitoxin | Emil von Behring & Shibasaburo Kitasato | 1890 |
| Discovery of plasmid DNA | Stanley Cohen, Annie Chang, Robert Helling and Herbert Boyer | 1973 |
| First discovery of zoonoses (Babesiosis) | Theobald Smith and F.L. Kilbourne | 1893 |
| Discovery of human blood groups | Karl Landsteiner | 1901 |
| Crystallization of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) | Wendell Stanley | 1935 |
| Discovery of first cancer virus | Francis Rous | 1911 |
| Discovery of lac operon | Francois Jacob, David Perrin, Carmen Sanchez and Jacques Monod | 1960 |
| Discovery of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) | Kary Mullis | 1985 |
| Discovery of Taq polymerase | Thomas Brock & Hudson Freeze | 1969 |
| Discovery of the genetic code | Marshall Nirenberg & Gobind H. Khorana | 1966 |
| Discovery of restriction enzymes or endonucleases | Hamilton Smith & David Nathans | 1970 |
| Discovery of DNA sequencing | Fred Sanger, Steven Niklen & Alan Coulson | 1977 |
| Discovery of clonal selection theory | Macfarlane F. Burnet | 1959 |
| Discovery of reverse transcriptase | Howard Temin, David Baltimore & Renato Dulbeccco | 1969 |
| Discovery of prions | Stanley Prusiner | 1981 |
| Discovery of bacterial transduction | Joshua Lederberg & Norton Zinder | 1952 |
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