Reply to '"Mycobacterium indicus pranii" is a strain of Mycobacterium intracellulare': "M. indicus pranii" is a distinct strain, not derived from M. intracellulare, and is an organism at an evolutionary transition point between a fast grower and slow grower.

Abstract

Alexander and Turenne in their letter (1) almost completely reiterate their previous comments on our earlier article, which was published in Nucleic Acids Research (2), to which we replied; their letter and the rebuttal were subsequently published (18, 19). In our earlier rebuttal, we clearly addressed all these issues and left no scope for revisiting them, and hence we are quite surprised that they did not even cite our original paper, their comments on this paper, or our earlier response in their latest letter. We are once again responding to their comments with a hope that there will be no further room for discussion on these issues. They state that the name “ Mycobacterium indicus pranii ” does not figure in the “List of Prokaryotic Names with Standing in Nomenclature” and that the designation M. indicus pranii does not conform to the binomial naming convention. This opinion is, in our view, irrelevant and nonsustainable. While most bacteria follow a binomial naming system, there are several examples of bacteria being named differently. M. avium paratuberculosis , from the mycobacterial family itself, is one such example. The fact that the name M. indicus pranii has three words does not take away its distinct morphological, biochemical, and genomic identity. Alexander's and Turenne's claim that they are unaware of any comparison of M. indicus pranii with a comprehensive panel of M. intracellulare or M. avium complex (MAC) reflects their ignorance (deliberate?) of published literature. We state once again that M. indicus pranii is very different from …