Possible reasons for this disagreem

Possible reasons for this disagreement between our
study and the others are (i) that the kimchi samples
examined by those authors had different ingredients
from our samples; (ii) that the previous studies were
based on culturing whereas ours is culture-independent
and (iii) that the identification methods used by those
workers were phenotype-based and relatively inaccurate,
whereas our study is based on more reliable 16S
rRNA sequence analysis. Because exactly identical
kimchi samples cannot be reproduced, it is not clear
whether W. koreensis, the predominant species in our
study, was indeed absent from the samples examined in
the previous studies, or whether it was misidentified,
perhaps as leuconostocs. In 1993 the genus Weissella
was proposed to harbor a phylogenetically coherent
group previously known as the bLc. paramesenteroidesQ
subgroup (Collins et al., 1993) and
resembles to the present member of the genus
Leuconostoc on the basis of morphological and
physiological characteristics. Moreover, W. koreensis
was only formally recognized in 2002 (Lee et al.,
2002). Therefore, it is possible that studies prior to
these taxonomic proposals identified weissellae as
leuconostocs.