The official species description paper of the novel Vibrio species, Vibrio cidicii, is now out. The paper is entitled "Characterization of clinical and environmental isolates of Vibrio cidicii sp. nov., a close relative of Vibrio navarrensis" and published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. Vibrio cidicii was initially identified by the group of Dr. Cheryl Tarr from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) while studying clinical isolates of V. navarrensis. Thus, the new species was named after the CDC.
Characterization of the isolates involved extensive biochemical and genotypic tests, including whole-genome comparisons with close relatives, V. navarrensis and Vibrio vulnificus. Metabolic profiling found one major phenotypic difference between V. cidicii from its closest relatives, the utilization of L-rhamnose, where the V. cidicii isolates are able to utilize the substrate. Genome comparisons and multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) show that the V. cidicii genomes to belong to a species different from V. navarrensis and V. vulnificus.
This work was in collaboration with the teams of Dr. Cheryl Tarr (CDC), Dr. I. King Jordan (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Dr. Rebecca Case (Department of Biological Sciences). This is the second novel Vibrio species characterized from the Boucher Lab (Vibrio metoecus being the first one).
MLSA of housekeeping genes show distinct clustering of V. cidicii from its closest relatives (from Orata et al., 2016)