The genus Legionella comprises multiple diverse species. While L. pneumophila is the best known of these, and the one responsible for most cases of Legionnaires’ disease, more than half of all known Legionella species have some reported clinical associations, while others have only ever been detected in environmental samples.
The Eawag team collected peer-reviewed information on all known Legionella species and produced a detailed and updated list of these. They recorded a total of 77 Legionella species and provided the original source reference for each. The list also contains references to clinical associations of the species. Notably, the clinical associations are more diverse than only pneumonia, but not necessarily very common. Finally, the list also contains environmental sources where the species were isolated from. These are, however, examples and not a complete list of all possible environmental sources for each organism.
The list is available for download at Github (https://github.com/mgabriell1/LegioSpecies) as a simple .PDF document with embedded links, or a detailed .CSV file, which can be used, edited and adapted. Interested people are welcomed to suggest the integration of other information by opening Github issues, making this list a community-driven live document useful for all. In addition, the list is also mirrored at Zenodo and provided with a DOI (10.5281/zenodo.11072744) in order to ease its citation.
ICNP: International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes.
