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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMATIC AND EVOLUTIONARY MICROBIOLOGY logo

Volume 71, Issue 9

Reconstituting the genus Open Access

Abstract

The definition of a genus has wide-ranging implications both in terms of binomial species names and also evolutionary relationships. In recent years, the definition of the genus has been debated due to the proposed split of this genus into five new genera (, , , and an emended ). Since this group of species contains many important obligate and opportunistic pathogens, it is important that any renaming of species does not cause confusion in clinical treatment as outlined by the rule (56a) of the Prokaryotic Code. In this study, we evaluated the proposed and original genus boundaries for the mycobacteria, to determine if the split into five genera was warranted. By combining multiple approaches for defining genus boundaries (16S rRNA gene similarity, amino acid identity index, average nucleotide identity, alignment fraction and percentage of conserved proteins) we show that the original genus is strongly supported over the proposed five-way split. Thus, we propose that the original genus label be reapplied to all species within this group, with the proposed five genera potentially used as sub-genus complex names.

  • Received:
  • Accepted:
  • Published Online:
Keyword(s): genome , genus and Mycobacterium
© 2021 The Authors
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License.
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2021-09-23
2024-04-25
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Reconstituting the genus Mycobacterium
Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 71, 004922 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.004922
/content/journal/ijsem/10.1099/ijsem.0.004922
/content/journal/ijsem/10.1099/ijsem.0.004922
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