Downloaded from www.microbiologyresearch.org by IP: 54.70.40.11 On: Sat, 29 Dec 2018 10:37:27 Blastococcus capsensis sp. nov., isolated from an archaeological Roman pool and emended description of the genus Blastococcus, B. aggregatus, B. saxobsidens, B. jejuensis and B. endophyticus Karima Hezbri, 1 Moussa Louati, 1 Imen Nouioui, 2 Maher Gtari, 1 Manfred Rohde, 3 Cathrin Spröer, 4 Peter Schumann, 4 Hans-Peter Klenk, 2 Faten Ghodhbane-Gtari 1 and Maria del Carmen Montero-Calasanz 2,4 Correspondence Faten Ghodhbane-Gtari feten.ghodhbane@fst.rnu.tn Maria del Carmen Montero- Calasanz maria.montero-calasanz@ncl. ac.uk 1 Laboratoire Microorganismes et Biomol ecules Actives, Universit e de Tunis El Manar (FST) & Universit e de Carthage (INSAT), 2092 Tunis, Tunisia 2 School of Biology, Newcastle University, Ridley Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK 3 Central Facility for Microscopy, HZI – Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research Inhoffenstraße 7, 38124 Braunschweig, Germany 4 Leibniz Institute DSMZ – German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, Inhoffenstraße 7B, 38124 Braunschweig, Germany A novel Gram-reaction-positive actinobacterium, designated BMG 804 T , was isolated from an archaeological Roman pool located in Gafsa, Tunisia. The strain grew as dry bright orange colonies at 30  C and pH 6.0–8.0. It contained meso-diaminopimelic acid in the cell wall. The whole-cell sugars consisted of glucose, rhamnose and ribose. Polar lipids present were diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylinositol, an unidentified glycolipid and two unidentified phospholipids. MK-9(H 4 ) was the predominant menaquinone. The fatty acid profile contained major amounts (>5 %) of C 17 : 1 !8c,C 16 : 1 !7c, iso-C 15 : 0 , iso-C 16 : 0 and iso-C 16 : 1 H. The 16S rRNA gene sequence of BMG 804 T showed 99.4 % as highest sequence similarity with Blastococcus saxobsidens. DNA–DNA hybridization between strain BMG 804 T and B. saxobsidens DSM 44509 T was 48.6±6.6 %. The G+C content of the DNA was 73.7 mol%. On the basis of the phenotypic and genotypic characteristics, including DNA–DNA hybridization results, BMG 804 T (=DSM 46835 T =CECT 8876 T ) is proposed as the type strain of a novel species Blastococcus capsensis sp. nov. Emended descriptions of the genus Blastococcus and the species Blastococcus aggregatus, B. saxobsidens, Blastococcus jejuensis and Blastococcus endophyticus are also proposed. The genus Blastococcus (Ahrens & Moll, 1970; Urzì et al., 2004; Lee, 2006) accommodates actinobacteria, often species forming buds or rods, giving the name of the genus; Normand et al. (2014). The genus Blastococcus is classified together with Geodermatophilus and Modestobacter in the family Geoderma- tophilaceae (Normand, 2006; Normand et al., 2014) of the order Geodermatophilales (Sen et al., 2014). There are four species of the genus Blastococcus with validly published names: Blastococcus aggregatus (Ahrens & Moll, 1970; Urzì et al., 2004), Blastococcus saxobsidens (Urzì et al., 2004), Blasto- coccus jejuensis (Lee, 2006) and Blastococcus endophyticus (Zhu et al., 2013). These were, respectively, isolated from sediment of Station Breitengrund at a depth of 20 m in the Western Bal- tic Sea, Marble Eleusys an archaeological site in Greece, sand sediment of a Korean beach in Jeju and and from healthy leaves of Camptotheca acuminate, a traditional Chinese medic- inal plant. Recently a non-validly named species, ‘Candidatus Blastococcus massiliensis’ has been reported from a single anorexia nervosa stool sample (Pfleiderer et al., 2013). The complete genome sequence (Chouaia et al., 2012) and The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession number for the 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain BMG 804 T is LN626274. Two supplementary figures are available with the online Supplementary Material. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (2016), 66, 4864–4872 DOI 10.1099/ijsem.0.001443 4864 001443 ã 2016 IUMS Printed in Great Britain