A report of 5 unrecorded bacterial species of the Deinococcus genus in Korea

Abstract

The genus Deinococcus was first proposed by Brooks & Murray (1981) when the type species Deinococcus radiodurans was isolated from gamma-ray-irradiated food. At the time of writing, the genus Deinococcus comprises 53 species with validly names isolated from diverse environments such as air, a hot spring, continental Antarctica, desert soil, fish, and water (http://www.bacterio. cict.fr/d/deinococcus.html). Members of the genus Deinococcus are Gram-positive (Brooks & Murray, 1981; Srinivasan et al., 2012a; 2012b) or Gram-negative (Suresh et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2007; Im et al., 2008; Chen et al., 2012), have L-ornithine as the di-amino acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan, and have cell colors ranging from yellow to red. They are characterized by their extreme resistant to UV light, gamma radiation and desiccation (Mattimore et al., 1996; Hirsch et al., 2004; de Groot et al., 2005; Rainey et al., 2005; Callegan et al., 2008; Srinivasan et al., 2012a, 2012b). The ionizing radiation and deciccation induced DNA damage and it has been reported that the members of the genus Deinococcus showed resistance and had ability to repair the damaged DNA (Mattimore & Battista, 1996). In 2014, we collected diverse local forest soil samples and isolated novel bacterial species and unrecorded bacterial species in Korea. The identified bacterial species belonged to the (class/phylum) Deinococci/ Deinococcus-Thermus. As a subset of this study, the present report focuses on the description of unrecorded radiation-resistant species belonging to the genus Deinococcus. Here we report 5 unrecorded bacterial species in Korea belonging to familiy Deinococcaceae of order Deinococcales in the Deinococcus-Thermus.