Comparative phylogeny of the Bacillaceae species related to shrimp paste products

Abstract

Shrimp paste is one of the traditional seafood products widely consumed in several Asian countries. Although the microbial diversity of shrimp paste remains largely undescribed to date, it has been suggested that the bacterial members of the order Bacillales are predominant. This study was therefore conducted to investigate the bacterial diversity especially for those of the family Bacillaceae, isolated from the shrimp paste products. For this 24 Bacillaceae strains related to the shrimp paste, as well as their nucleotide sequences of the 16S rRNA gene were retrieved from the GenBank database. To elucidate the phylogeny of these Bacillaceae isolates, their 16S rRNA genes were aligned and used to construct the dendogram. Based on the analysis, these 23 Bacillaceae strains were categorized into three major clades: (i) Bacillus subtilis/amyloliquefaciens complex; (ii) Bacillus cereus group; and (iii) non-Bacillus species.