The family Dermacoccaceae

Abstract

The family Dermacoccaceae, a member of the order Micrococcales, comprises eight genera and 14 species. Irrespective of the algorithm used for the generation of 16S rRNA gene sequence trees, Kytococcus does not cluster with the other members of the family but shows a closer relationship to members of the family Intrasporangiaceae. Chemotaxonomic evidence supports the phylogenetic separateness of the genus Kytococcus. Dermacoccaceae genera, except Kytococcus, will be referred to as authentic members of the family in the following. Neighbor-joining (NJ) and maximum likelihood (ML) dendrograms do not agree in their clustering of the authentic members of Dermacoccaceae. While they constitute a coherent cluster in the NJ tree, four lineages emerge from the ML analysis. In this tree, the genera Serinicoccus and Ornithinimicrobium, though defined by a different, ornithine-based instead of lysine-based peptidoglycan type (Groth et al. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 51:81-87, 2001; Hana et al. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 54:1585-1589, 2004), cluster with certain genera of Dermacoccaceae.