The heat shock protein 70 gene as a new alternative molecular marker for the taxonomic identification of Streptomyces strains

With the developments in taxonomy, the classically used highly conserved 16S rRNA molecular markerhas shown some disadvantages among closely related species. For further taxonomic studies of the prokaryotes, specific PCR primers were designed from two conserved regions in the amino acid sequences of the 70-kDa heat shock proteinsourced from 20 different genera in actinomycetes. These were used for the amplification of the hsp70genes in 16 Streptomycesstrains. Then, we investigated the phylogenetic relationships among these Streptomycesstrains and compared the tree topology based on the hsp70gene with those based on the previously used markers (16S rRNA and gyrB). To our knowledge, this is the first useof the hsp70gene as a molecular markerfor the taxonomic identification of Streptomyces.