Unidentified Soil Organism - (Sep/05/2009 )

I use a final concentration of 20% glycerol on my frozen stocks too. I'll see about the paper in the morning; I've got a ton of stuff to do today...
Angie

Be aware that your Gram stain could be the base of the problem. Follow homebrew's suggestion. API's are pretty poor for id of environmental bugs.

due to time constraints and budget cuts, I contacted the CDC and they said they would do some tests. Their result was:
" The DNA sample yielded a 1490 bp good quality 16s rRNA gene sequence. The Top BLAST matches were to various entries for "Pseudomonas spp.". The first named species in the BLAST result is to: emb|AM411058.1| Pseudomonas putida partial 16S rRNA gene, strain 5zhy Identities = 1486/1488 (99.87%), Gaps = 0/1488 (0%). It seems that your isolate is a Pseudomonas putida or undescribed Pseudomonas spp.

Thanks to everyone that made contributions to the original question!

You are welcome.

Frankly speaking, 16s rRNA doesn't give much information and most of the time is misleading for my case. IF they can perform a flagellin typing and/with type 3 secretion system, the result will be more convincing.

Just hope that they are not trying to hide something there due to security reason.