Kocuria Rosea, I choose you!

In a previous post, I noted that I was currently working on identifying some environmental isolates I took from various locations.  When I got my 16S sequences back, I had the ever so popular Micrococcus, Staphylococcus, and Bacillus bacteria in most of my samples.  Two that stood out were Kocuria Kristinae (OTW) and Kocuria Rosea (OTCP).  Of the Kocuria species, only one has been completed and published, Kocuria Rhizophilia.  One other is in permanent draft, and another three are targeted.  By using BLAST on my two samples 16S gene, I determined that both are 96% related at the 16S gene level to the published species.  Because of this difference, both samples are fairly distantly related to Kocuria Rhizophilia.

Now came the hard question of which one to use for library construction.  Both are very closely related and found in the same general type of environment.  I checked my genomic DNA concentration of the two samples and it turned out that I did not have much genomic DNA of Kocuria Kristinae and had plenty genomic DNA (about 785 ng/µL) of Kocuria Rosea.  Thus, it was more practical for me to use Kocuria Rosea for my library construction project.

To give you a little information on Kocuria Rosea, it is a type of soil bacterium that has been found in various locations such as a polluted soil, indoor environments, deep sea sediments, and a spacecraft.  But mostly, it is isolated from soil and water.  A paper online has also attributed it to a catheter-related bacterium.