Downloaded from www.microbiologyresearch.org by IP: 54.70.40.11 On: Sat, 01 Dec 2018 18:16:36 Thiorhodococcus fuscus sp. nov., isolated from a lagoon K. V. N. S. Lakshmi, 1 B. Divyasree, 2 K. Sucharita, 3 Ch. Sasikala 2 and Ch. V. Ramana 1 Correspondence Ch. Sasikala sasi449@yahoo.ie Ch. V. Ramana cvr449@gmail.com 1 Department of Plant Sciences, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, P.O. Central University, Hyderabad 500046, India 2 Bacterial Discovery Laboratory, Centre for Environment, Institute of Science and Technology, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad, Kukatpally, Hyderabad 500085, India 3 Government Women’s college, Railpet, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh 522001, India A brown, moderately halophilic, photoautotrophic bacterium designated strain JA363 T was purified from a photoheterotrophic enrichment obtained from sediment from Chilika lagoon, Odisha, India. Cells of the isolate were coccoid, motile by means of single polar flagellum and Gram-stain-negative. Strain JA363 T had an obligate requirement for NaCl and could tolerate up to 7 % (w/v) NaCl. Strain JA363 T had complex growth factor requirements. Internal photosynthetic membranes were present as vesicles. Strain JA363 T contained bacteriochlorophyll a and spirilloxanthin series carotenoids with rhodopin as a major (.85 %) component. C 16 : 1 v7c/C 16 : 1 v6c,C 18 : 1 v7c and C 16 : 0 were the major fatty acids and phosphatidylglycerol and phosphatidylethanolamine were the major polar lipids. Q8 was the predominant quinone system of strain JA363 T . The DNA G+C content was 64 mol%. The highest 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity of strain JA363 T was found with the type strains of Thiorhodococcus kakinadensis (98.7 %), Thiohalobacter thiocyanaticus (98.2 %), Thiophaeococcus fuscus (97.4 %) and Thiorhodococcus bheemlicus (96.3 %). However, the phylogenetic trees generated firmly placed strain JA363 T in the genus Thiorhodococcus, which was further supported by phenotypic and chemotaxonomic evidence. Consequently, strain JA363 T is described as representing a novel species of the genus Thiorhodococcus as Thiorhodococcus fuscus sp. nov. The type strain is JA363 T (5KCTC 5701 T 5NBRC 104959 T ). Purple sulfur bacteria are often found in anoxic sediments and in shallow waters where there is the presence of both reduced sulfur compounds and solar light (Rabold et al., 2006). During our survey of one such water body at Chilika lagoon, a marine habitat with neutral pH, an unexpectedly rich diversity of cultivable purple anoxygenic phototrophs was revealed. Among the several bacteria isolated, a moder- ately halophilic bacterium affiliated to the genus Thiorho- dococcus was isolated from the sediment of Chilika lake at Satpada, Odisha, India (GPS position: 198 399 E 858 229 N). The sample had a pH of 7.0 and salinity of 3.5 %. Members of the genus Thiorhodococcus are spherical to slightly ovoid, motile, multiply by binary fission and show obligate phototrophy. These strains are morphologi- cally similar to species of the genera Thiocystis and Thio- phaeococcus, but differ from them in their 16S rRNA gene sequences and several other aspects (Imhoff et al., 1998; Anil Kumar et al., 2008). This truly marine genus is cur- rently represented by five species with validly published names; Thiorhodococcus minor (Guyoneaud et al., 1997), Thiorhodococcus mannitoliphagus (Rabold et al., 2006), Thiorhodococcus bheemlicus, Thiorhodococcus kakinadensis (Anil Kumar et al., 2007) and Thiorhodococcus modestalka- liphilus (Sucharita et al., 2010). The name of a sixth member ‘Thiorhodococcus drewsii’ (Zaar et al., 2003) has not been validly published. Strain JA363 T was recovered from a photoheterotrophic enrichment in a medium described previously (Shivali et al., 2011; without supplementing sodium bicarbonate), incubated at 2400 lx, 30 8C for 7 days in 45 ml fully Abbreviations: ML, maximum-likelihood; MP, maximum-parsimony; NJ, neighbour-joining. The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession number for the 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain JA363 T is AM993157. Five supplementary figures and a supplementary table are available with the online Supplementary Material. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (2015), 65, 3938–3943 DOI 10.1099/ijsem.0.000517 000517 G 2015 IUMS Printed in Great Britain 3938