Elizabethkingia meningoseptica
| Elizabethkingia meningoseptica | |
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| Wet raised colonies with clear margin and characteristic smell on Blood agar growth. Bacteria plated in this way may not show yellow color. Vancomycin sensitivity (clearing around disk) and colistin resistance may lead to mistaking this organism as gram positive. | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Domain: | Bacteria |
| Phylum: | Bacteroidetes |
| Class: | Flavobacteriia |
| Order: | Flavobacteriales |
| Family: | Flavobacteriaceae |
| Genus: | Elizabethkingia |
| Species: | E. meningoseptica |
| Binomial name | |
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Elizabethkingia meningoseptica (King, 1959) Kim et al., 2005 |
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Elizabethkingia meningoseptica is a gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium widely distributed in nature (e.g. fresh water, salt water, or soil). It may be normally present in fish and frogs but is not normally present in human microflora. In 1959, the American bacteriologist Elizabeth O. King (who isolated Kingella kingae in 1960) was studying unclassified bacteria associated with pediatric meningitis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, when she isolated an organism (CDC group IIa) that she named Flavobacterium meningosepticum (Flavobacterium means "the yellow bacillus" in Latin; meningosepticum likewise means "associated with meningitis and sepsis"). In 1994, it was reclassified in the genus Chryseobacterium and renamed Chryseobacterium meningosepticum(chryseos = "golden" in Greek, so Chryseobacterium means a golden/yellow rod similar to Flavobacterium). In 2005, a 16S rRNA phylogenetic tree of Chryseobacteria showed that C. meningosepticum along with C. miricola (which was reported to have been isolated from Russian space station Mir in 2001 and placed in the genus Chryseobacterium in 2003) were close to each other but outside the tree of the rest of the Chryseobacteria and were then placed in a new genus Elizabethkingia named after the original discoverer of F. meningosepticum.
Two species of Elizabethkingia have recently been found to be abundant on the leaf and root surfaces of the tropical tree Gnetum gnemon in Malaysia. Their role in the biology of the plant is unknown. Several other species of tropical trees studied did not have Elizabethkingia present on their leaves or roots, suggesting a host-specific relationship with Gnetum.
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