Aquisalibacillus elongatus gen. nov., sp nov., a moderately halophilic bacterium of the family Bacillaceae isolated from a saline lake

A novel moderately halophilic, non-motile, rod-shaped bacterium was isolated from a saline lake, Lake Shangmatala, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China. This bacterium, designated SH4s(T), was strictly aerobic, catalase-positive and oxidase-negative. It grew at salinities of 3-20% (w/v) NaCl, with an optimum at 10% (w/v) NaCl. The cell-wall peptidoglycan was of the A4 beta type, based on L-Orn-D-Asp, and the major quinone was a menaquinone with seven isoprene units (MK-7). The major fatty acids were iso-C-16:0 and iso-C-15:0. The polar lipids consisted of diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphaticlylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, a glycolipid and four different unidentified phospholipids. The DNA G + C content was 45.9 mol%. In a maximum-parsimony phylogenetic tree based on 16S rRNA gene sequences, strain SH4s(T) was found to belong to the family Bacillaceae and to be most closely related to members of the genera Filobacillus (95.9 % sequence similarity), Piscibacillus (95.7 %) and Tenuibacillus (95.4 %). DNA-DNA hybridization experiments revealed 10 % relatedness (112 %, reciprocally) between strain SH4s(T) and Filobacillus milosensis DSM 13259(T), the sole species of the genus. All of these data show that strain SH4s(T) represents a novel genus and species in the family Bacillaceae, for which the name Aquisalibacillus elongatus gen. nov., sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain of Aquisalibacillus elongatus is SH4s(T) (=CCM 7366(T) CECT 714 9(T) =DSM 18090(T)).