Devosia chinhatensis sp. nov., isolated from a hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) dump site in India.

A Gram-negative, motile, rod-shaped and non-spore-forming bacterium was isolated from a soil sample collected from the area adjoining an India Pesticide Limited plant, Lucknow, India. Strain IPL18T was characterized on the basis of phenotypic and genotypic data. Based on 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis, this strain was shown to belong to genus Devosia, with highest sequence similarity of 97.5 % to Devosia riboflavina DSM 7230T. A neighbour-joining phylogenetic tree based on 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis revealed that strain IPL18T shows an evolutionary relationship with Devosia neptuniae J1T. Strain IPL18T contains C18 : 1 omega 7c, 11-methyl C18 : 1 omega 7c and C16 : 0 as the major fatty acids along with 3-OH C18 : 0, characteristic of the genus Devosia. The branched-chain fatty acid iso-H C18 : 1 (4.69 %), not present in any of the Devosia species known so far, has been reported in strain IPL18T. The results of DNA-DNA hybridization experiments (13 % relatedness with D. riboflavina DSM 7230T and 11 % with D. neptuniae J1T), phylogenetic analysis and biochemical tests confirm that strain IPL18T represents a novel species of the genus Devosia for which the name Devosia chinhatensis sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is IPL18T (=CCM 7426T=MTCC 8593T).