Downloaded from www.microbiologyresearch.org by IP: 54.70.40.11 On: Wed, 09 Jan 2019 10:11:22 Microbacterium aureliae sp. nov., a novel actinobacterium isolated from Aurelia aurita, the moon jellyfish Gurwinder Kaur, 1 † Parveen Mual, 1 † Narender Kumar, 2 Ashish Verma, 1 Anand Kumar, 1 Srinivasan Krishnamurthi 1 and Shanmugam Mayilraj 1 Correspondence Shanmugam Mayilraj mayil@imtech.res.in 1 MTCC – Microbial Type Culture Collection & Gene Bank, CSIR – Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh 160 036, India 2 Division of Protein Science & Engineering, CSIR – Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh 160 036, India The taxonomic position of a lemon-yellow-pigmented actinobacterium, strain JF-6 T , isolated from Aurelia aurita, the moon jellyfish, collected from the Bay of Bengal coast, Kanyakumari, India, was determined using a polyphasic approach. The strain had phenotypic and chemotaxonomic properties that were consistent with its classification in the genus Microbacterium. Alignment of the 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain JF-6 T with sequences from Microbacterium arthrosphaerae CC-VM-Y T , Microbacterium yannicii G72 T , Microbacterium trichothecenolyticum IFO 15077 T , Microbacterium flavescens DSM 20643 T , Microbacterium insulae DS-66 T , Microbacterium resistens DMMZ 1710 T and Microbacterium thalassium IFO 16060 T revealed similarities of 98.95, 98.76, 98.43, 98.41, 98.41, 98.26 and 98.22 %, respectively. However, the levels of DNA–DNA relatedness with its closest phylogenetic neighbours confirmed that it represents a novel species within the genus. The major polar lipids were phosphatidylglycerol, diphosphatidylglycerol and an unknown glycolipid. The major menaquinones detected for strain JF-6 T were MK-13 and MK-12. The diamino acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan was ornithine and the peptidoglycan was type B2b (Glu/Hyg–Gly–D-Orn). The DNA G+C content was 69.4 mol%. Based on these differences, strain JF-6 T (=MTCC 11843 T =JCM 30060 T =KCTC 39828 T ) should be classified as the type strain of a novel species of Microbacterium, for which the name Microbacterium aureliae sp. nov. is proposed. The genus Microbacterium was first described by Orla-Jensen (1919), and the description was later emended by Collins et al. (1983), Takeuchi & Hatano (1998) and Krishnamurthi et al. (2012). Species of the genus have been isolated from diverse environmental habitats such as soil, insects, plants, clinical samples, water, fermented products and marine environments. At the time of writing, the genus Microbacterium consists of 92 species with validly published names (http://www.bacterio. net/microbacterium.html). Here, for the first time we report and describe the taxonomic status of an actinobacterium, strain JF-6 T , isolated from Aurelia aurita, the moon jellyfish. Strain JF-6 T was isolated from jellyfish, collected from the Bay of Bengal coast, Kanyakumari, India (11  30¢ N 79  47¢ E) by the dilution-plate technique on Zobell marine agar as well as on tryptic soy agar (ZMA, TSA; HiMedia) and main- tained as glycerol stocks at 70  C. Reference strains of the genus Microbacterium, M. arthrosphaerae DSM 22421 T , M. flavescens DSM 20643 T , M. yannicii JCM 18959 T , M. thalas- sium JCM 12079 T , M. insulae JCM 19115 T , M. trichothece- nolyticum JCM 1358 T and M. resistens JCM 11686 T , were obtained from the German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (DSMZ), Germany, and Japan Collection of Microorganisms (JCM), Japan. Colony and cell morphology were studied according to standard methods (Murray et al., 1994). The Gram reaction was determined using a Gram staining kit (HiMedia) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Growth at dif- ferent temperatures (10, 12, 15, 20, 25, 30, 37 and 42  C), pH (5.0, 6.5, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, 11.0, 12.0, using biological buffers to set the pH; Xu et al., 2005) and NaCl concentra- tions (0, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12 %, w/v) was examined by †These authors contributed equally to this work. Abbreviation: MALDI-TOF, matrix-assisted laser desorption time-of- flight. The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession number for the 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain JF-6 T is KF793922. Five supplementary figures are available with the online Supplementary Material. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (2016), 66, 4665–4670 DOI 10.1099/ijsem.0.001407 001407 ã 2016 IUMS Printed in Great Britain 4665