 In 1994, it was reclassified in the genus "Chryseobacterium" and renamed "Chryseobacterium meningosepticum"("chryseos" = "golden" in Greek, so "Chryseobacterium" means a golden/yellow rod similar to "Flavobacterium").In 2005, a 16S rRNA phylogenetic tree of Chryseobacteria showed that "C. meningosepticum" along with "C. miricola" (which was reported to have been isolated from Russian space station Mir in 2001 and placed in the genus "Chryseobacterium" in 2003) were close to each other but outside the tree of the rest of the Chryseobacteria and were then placed in a new genus "Elizabethkingia" named after the original discoverer of "F. meningosepticum".Two species of "Elizabethkingia" have recently been found to be abundant on the leaf and root surfaces of the tropical tree "Gnetum gnemon" in Malaysia.