Development of PCR primers specific for the amplification and direct sequencing of gyrB genes from microbacteria, order Actinomycetales

PCR primer sets were developed for the specific amplification and sequence analyses encoding the gyrase subunit B (gyrB) of members of the family Microbacteriaceae, class Actinobacteria. The family contains species highly related by 16S rRNA gene sequence analyses. In order to test if the gene sequence analysis of gyrB is appropriate to discriminate between closely related species, we evaluate the 16S rRNA gene phylogeny of its members. As the published universal primer set for gyrB failed to amplify the responding gene of the majority of the 80 type strains of the family, three new primer sets were identified that generated fragments with a composite sequence length of about 900 nt. However, the amplification of all three fragments was successful only in 25% of the 80 type strains. In this study, the substitution frequencies in genes encoding gyrase and 16S rDNA were compared for 10 strains of nine genera. The frequency of gyrB nucleotide substitution is significantly higher than that of the 16S rDNA, and no linear correlation exists between the similarities of both molecules among members of the Microbacteriaceae. The phylogenetic analyses using the gyrB sequences provide higher resolution than using 16S rDNA sequences and seem able to discriminate between closely related species.