Lutibaculum baratangense gen. nov., sp. nov., a proteobacterium isolated from a mud volcano

Abstract

A novel Gram-negative, oval to rod-shaped, motile bacterium, strain AMV1(T), was isolated from a soil sample collected from a mud volcano of Baratang Island, Andamans, India. The predominant fatty acids were C(16:0) (5.7%), C(18:1)ω7c (78.6%) and C(19:0) cyclo ω8c (6.3%). Strain AMV1(T) contained ubiquinone 10 (Q-10) as the major respiratory quinone and minor quantities of ubiquinone 9 (Q-9). The polar lipids consisted of diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, three unidentified lipids, one unidentified phospholipid and one unidentified aminolipid. 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis indicated that strain AMV1(T) was related most closely to the type strains of Tepidamorphus gemmatus, Bauldia consociata, Afifella pfennigii and Amorphus coralli, four members of the order Rhizobiales (class Alphaproteobacteria), with pairwise sequence similarities of 95.0, 94.5, 94.4 and 94.0%, respectively; it shared <94% 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity with all the other members of the order Rhizobiales. Phylogenetic analyses indicated that strain AMV1(T) clustered with Tepidamorphus gemmatus and with species of the genera Amorphus, Rhodobium and Afifella. Phenotypic and phylogenetic characteristics thus suggest that strain AMV1(T) is a representative of a novel species of a new genus, for which the name Lutibaculum baratangense gen. nov., sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain of Lutibaculum baratangense is AMV1(T) ( = KCTC 22669(T) = NBRC 105799(T) = CCUG 58046(T)).