Bavariicoccus seileri gen. nov., sp. nov., isolated from the surface and smear water of German red smear soft cheese

Abstract

Bavariicoccus seileri gen. nov., sp. nov., isolated from the surface and smear water of German red smear soft cheese The phylogenetic position and physiological characters of six hitherto-unknown lactic acid bacterial isolates, which form part of the surface microbiota of German red smear soft cheese, are reported. The coccoid cells are aerotolerant, Gram-positive, catalase-negative and non-motile. The cell-wall peptidoglycan contains alanine, glutamic acid, lysine and aspartic acid and is of the A4a type (L-Lys-D-Asp). The sequences of the 16S rRNA, groEL and rpoB genes of the six isolates are identical and reveal that these isolates represent an independent lineage within the radiation of the family Enterococcaceae in the phylum Firmicutes. Their closest phylogenetic neighbour is the lactic acid bacterium Atopobacter phocae M1590/94/2 T , with which they share 94.9 % 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity; representatives of other genera such as Granulicatella, Carnobacterium and Trichococcus are more distantly related. DNA-DNA hybridization studies reveal that the six isolates are members of a single species, and this is confirmed by similarities in biochemical characteristics. The six isolates were assigned four different groups by Fourier-transform infrared and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA typing. Therefore, it is formally proposed that these isolates should be classified in a single novel species of a novel genus and be named Bavariicoccus seileri gen. nov., sp. nov. The type strain of Bavariicoccus seileri is WCC 4188 T (5DSM 19936 T 5CCUG 55508 T ).Red smear cheeses are mainly produced in Austria, Germany, France, Scandinavia and Switzerland. For the ripening process, the microbial consortia of mature cheeses are washed off the surfaces with a brine solution, which is then used for inoculation of freshly produced cheeses. By virtue of the traditional manufacturing process, a variety of different smear cheeses exist which often comprise quite complex, species-rich microbial consortia (Brennan et al., 2004;Feurer et al., 2004;Maoz et al., 2003; Mounier et al., 2005;Wenning et al., 2006). Some recently described species have been isolated from these consortia, such as We have studied the species composition of South German red smear microbial consortia by aerobic cultivation on PC agar supplemented with 3 % NaCl (Maoz et al., 2003) and quantitative analysis of the species composition by Fouriertransform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. FT-IR sample preparation, spectrum recording and data evaluation were performed as described by Kümmerle et al. (1998) using an IFS-28B spectrometer and OPUS version 5.5 (Bruker). To reduce the difficulties arising from unavoidable baseline shifts and to improve the resolution of complex bands, the first derivation of the digitized original spectra was used for data evaluation. Isolates were identified using spectral Abbreviation: FT-IR, Fourier-transform infrared; RAPD, randomly amplified polymorphic DNA. 3Present address:

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