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

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.