This technology includes 8 novel strains of the species Streptococcus mitis, Streptococcus oralis, and Streptococcus infantis for vaccine or probiotic development. The capsular biosynthetic genes from each of these strains are highly related to pneumococcal counterparts encoding 5 capsular serotypes. All 8 of these non-pneumococcal strains were recovered from nasopharyngeal (NP) or oropharyngeal (OP) specimens. To achieve their isolation, OP and NP specimens were screened while employing serotype-specific PCR assays and subsequently isolated the positive strains from these specimens through culturing on blood agar plates.