Taxonomy of the Vibrios

The taxonomy of vibrios was based on very few morphological features, including flagellation, morphology and curvature of the cells, and cultural aspects. This approach led to the description of many new, poorly characterized species. The DNA-DNA hybridization studies of researchers underpinned the taxonomy of vibrios. This chapter discusses the historical underpinnings of vibrio taxonomy and the traditional phenotypic basis of the taxonomy of Vibrio harveyi group. Subsequently, it provides a review of the recent improvements in the taxonomy of vibrios that are mainly due to the application of genomic methodologies, including amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP), repetitive extragenic palindromic polymerase chain reaction (rep-PCR), DNA-DNA hybridization, and multilocus sequence analyses (MLSA). The authors conclude the chapter with a discussion on the development and application of an electronic prokaryotic taxonomy with vibrios as a prototype. The current taxonomy of vibrios is based mainly on genomic data. The taxonomy of vibrios is being rapidly improved owing to the application of modern molecular techniques. New data gathered by these techniques will lead to a revision and improvement of the taxonomy of vibrios in the next few years.