Elizabethkingia meningoseptica

Elizabethkingia meningoseptica
Wet raised colonies with clear margin and characteristic smell after culturing on blood agar, 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:	Bacteroidota
Class:	Flavobacteriia
Order:	Flavobacteriales
Family:	Weeksellaceae
Genus:	Elizabethkingia
Species:	E. meningoseptica
Binomial name
Elizabethkingia meningoseptica (King, 1959) Kim et al., 2005
Synonyms
Flavobacterium meningosepticum King 1959 Chryseobacterium meningosepticum (King 1959) Vandamme et al. 1994 Elizabethkingia meningoseptica (King 1959) Kim et al. 2005

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; it may be isolated from chronic infectious states, as in the sputum of cystic fibrosis patients. In 1959, 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").^[1] In 1994, it was reclassified in the genus Chryseobacterium and renamed Chryseobacterium meningosepticum^[2](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^[3]) 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.^[4]