Rheinheimera pleomorphica sp. nov., a Novel Alkali-Tolerant Bacteria Isolated from Chilika Lake, India.

A novel Gram-negative gamma-proteobacterium, non-sporulating motile, rod or coccus-shaped bacterium designated as strain PKS7T was isolated from a sediment sample collected from Chilika Lake, Odisha, India and characterized taxonomically using a polyphasic approach. The major quinone was Q8 and major cellular fatty acids were C16:0, C17:0, C15:1w8c, C17:1w8c, C12:03-OH. The chemotaxonomic features confirmed the isolate to be a member of genus Rheinheimera. 16SrRNA gene sequence of strain PKS7T was closest in similarity to R. aquimaris SW-353T (99.36% identity), R. muenzenbergensis E49T (98.63%), R. nanhaiensis E407-8T (98.35%), R. japonica KMM 9513T (98.35%) and R. baltica DSM-14885T (98.08%). The 16S rRNA gene sequence-based phylogenetic analysis and sequence similarity between the isolated strain and type strains also revealed its affiliation to genus Rheinheimera. DNA-DNA relatedness with closest type strain R. aquimaris SW-353T was 25.0% (±3.40) and in silico DDH showed values in the range of 17.7-37.1% with the type strains of the genus Rheinheimera for which whole genome sequence are available. Strain PKS7T was also distinguished by a multi-locus sequence analysis (MLST) by alingning gyrB gene sequences of the closest type strains of Rheinheimera. The draft genome of strain PKS7T contained 32 contigs of total size 3,963,569 bp comprising of 3763 predicted coding sequences with a G + C content of 50.7 mol%. Comparision of phenotypic and genotypic data with its closest neighbours and closely related species confirm the strain PKS7T to be recognised as a novel species within the genus Rheinheimera, for which the name Rheinheimera pleomorphica sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is PKS7T (= KCTC 42365 = JCM 30460).