Upon division, Caulobacter cells produce two very different daughter cells.One daughter cell is a mobile "swarmer" cell that has a single flagellum at one cell pole that provides swimming motility for chemotaxis. The other daughter cell, called the "stalked" cell, has a tubular stalk structure protruding from one pole that has an adhesive holdfast material on its end, with which the stalked cell can adhere to surfaces. Swarmer cells differentiate into stalked cells after a short period of motility. Chromosome replication and cell division only occurs in the stalked cell stage.

The Caulobacter genus was historically divided into several types, one of which was called Caulobacter crescentus, based on its crescent shape, which is caused by the protein crescentin. However, Caulobacter crescentus strains were eventually re-classidied as Caulobacter vibrioides strains.

Caulobacter vibrioides CB15 was isolated in 1962 from pond water [POINDEXTER64]. Strain Caulobacter vibrioides NA1000, which was derived from CB15 in the 1970s, is preferred by scientisits since it allows physical separation of the stalked and predivisional cells from each other.

The PGDB was created from the annotated genome by a team from Stanford University and SRI International using the PathoLogic component of the Pathway Tools software [Karp11, Karp19] and the MetaCyc reference database [Caspi20]. The PGDB, which integrates the biochemical reaction network and metabolic pathways of the organism with its genome, was improved by limited manual curation, including an overview of transcriptional regulation.