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A proposal to unify two subspecies of Staphylococcus equorum: Staphylococcus equorum subsp. equorum and Staphylococcus equorum subsp. linens

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Abstract

Twelve isolates from jeotgal, a Korean high-salt-fermented seafood, identified as Staphylococcus equorum were compared by phenotypic and genotypic methods to determine their precise taxonomic identities at the subspecies level. Four strains and three strains had complete 16S rRNA gene sequence matches with S. equorum subsp. equorum DSM 20674T and S. equorum subsp. linens DSM 15097T, respectively. Five strains showed 99.9 % identity with the sequences of both type strains. In our DNA–DNA hybridization analyses among two type strains and two isolates, the similarities were over 72 % and were higher than the similarities presented at the subspecies proposal. Physiological characteristics such as sugar utilization, β-galactosidase activity, novobiocin resistance and salt tolerance, which were adopted for subspecies separation, could not be applied to assign the isolates to a taxonomic unit. Antibiotic susceptibility, hemolytic activity, biofilm formation and protein profiles did not present markers to divide the isolates into either of the subspecies. Multilocus sequence typing of the sequences of the 16S rRNA gene and five housekeeping genes did not produce any coherent relationship among the isolates and type strains. Repetitive element-PCR fingerprinting using ERIC (enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus) primers classified 12 isolates to three genotypes, and the genotypes of both type strains coincided with two isolates expressing different characteristics. Based on these phenotypic and genotypic analyses results, we propose to unify the present two subspecies of S. equorum into one species, S. equorum.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by R&D Convergence Center Support Program, Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Republic of Korea and supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (NRF-2012R1A1A2039955). This work (Seulhwa Han) was supported by Kyonggi University Research Assistant Fellowship 2012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Food Science and Biotechnology, Kyonggi University, Suwon, 443-760, South Korea

    Do-Won Jeong, Hye-Rim Kim, Seulhwa Han & Jong-Hoon Lee

  2. Department of Life Science and Research Center for Biomolecules and Biosystems, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, 156-756, South Korea

    Che Ok Jeon

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  1. Do-Won Jeong
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  2. Hye-Rim Kim
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Correspondence to Jong-Hoon Lee.

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Jeong, DW., Kim, HR., Han, S. et al. A proposal to unify two subspecies of Staphylococcus equorum: Staphylococcus equorum subsp. equorum and Staphylococcus equorum subsp. linens . Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 104, 1049–1062 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-013-0025-z

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