“…The genus Kocuria was established by Stackebrandt et al (1995) by taxonomic dissection of the genus Micrococcus , and was clearly separated from Micrococcus and Micrococcus -related taxa on the basis of phylogenetic analyses using 16S rRNA gene sequences. At the time of writing (November 2014), the genus Kocuria , contains 19 species with validly published names including Kocuria kristinae , Kocuria rosea and Kocuria varians (Stackebrandt et al , 1995), Kocuria erythromyxa (Rainey et al , 1997; later reclassified as a later synonym of K. rosea ), Kocuria palustris , Kocuria rhizophila (Kovács et al , 1999), Kocuria polaris (Reddy et al , 2003), Kocuria marina (Kim et al , 2004), Kocuria carniphila (Tvrzová et al , 2005), Kocuria aegyptia (Li et al , 2006), Kocuria himachalensis (Mayilraj et al , 2006), Kocuria flava , Kocuria turfanensis (Zhou et al , 2008), Kocuria halotolerans (Tang et al , 2009), Kocuria atrinae (Park et al , 2010a), Kocuria koreensis (Park et al , 2010b), Kocuria gwangalliensis (Seo et al , 2009), Kocuria salsicia (Yun et al , 2011) and Kocuria indica (Dastager et al , 2014). During our study on the microbial diversity and taxonomy of the halotolerant and halophilic bacteria from saline and alkaline soils in the Songnen Plain (Pan et al , 2012), an actinobacterium, designated NEAU-ST5-33 T , was shown to share a 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity of 98.8 % with K. polaris CMS 76or T and K. rosea DMS 20447 T , suggesting that strain NEAU-ST5-33 T may represent a novel taxon.…”