Streptomyces tibetensis sp. nov., an actinomycete isolated from the Tibetan Plateau.

A novel actinomycete, designated strain XZ 46T, was isolated from acid sandy soil collected from the Tibetan Plateau, China. Its taxonomic position was determined using a polyphasic approach. Strain XZ 46T shows the typical morphological and chemotaxonomic features of members of the genus Streptomyces: slightly yellow to brown substrate mycelia and grayish white to slightly yellow aerial hyphae forming cylindrical and spiny spores; meso-diaminopimelic acid in the cell wall peptidoglycan; MK-9(H8), MK-9(H4) and MK-9(H2) as predominant menaquinones; diphosphatidylglycerol, phospatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylglycerol and phosphatidylinositol as main polar lipids; and iso-C15:0, iso-C16:0 and anteiso-C15:0 as major cellular fatty acids. The G+C content of the draft genome sequence, consisting of 8,995,813 bp, is 71.23%. The16S rRNA gene sequence analysis indicated that strain XZ 46T shows high sequence similarity to Streptomyces luteogriseus NBRC 13402T as well as forming an independent lineage clade with it in phylogenetic trees. Multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) of five housekeeping genes (atpD, gyrB, recA, rpoB and trpB) illustrated that Streptomyces hawaiiensis is also a very closely related taxon. However, DNA-DNA hybridization, MLSA evolutionary distance and phenotypic properties demonstrate that strain XZ 46T can be distinguished from these phylogenetically related Streptomyces species. Therefore, it is concluded that strain XZ 46T represents a novel species of the genus Streptomyces, for which the name Streptomyces tibetensis is sp. nov. proposed. The type strain is XZ 46T (= CGMCC 4.7579T = KCTC 49221T).