and Song-Gun Kim2 Correspondence

A Gram-positive, rod-shaped, non-spore-forming bacterium (Gsoil 346T) was isolated from the soil of a ginseng field in South Korea and was characterized in order to determine its taxonomic position. On the basis of 16S rRNA gene sequences, strain Gsoil 346T was shown to belong to the genus Nocardioides in the family Nocardioidaceae, with the most closely related species being Nocardioides aquiterrae GW-9T (96.6 % 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity); however, the strain clustered in a distinct branch of the phylogenetic tree with Nocardioides kongjuensis A2-4T (96.2%), Nocardioides aromaticivorans H-1T (96.1%), Nocardioides nitrophenolicus NSP41T (96.1%) and Nocardioides simplex ATCC 15799T (95.9%). Strain Gsoil 346T was characterized chemotaxonomically and found to have LL-2,6-diaminopimelic acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan, phosphatidylinositol and phosphatidylglycerol as the major polar lipids, MK-8(H4) as the predominant menaquinone and iso-C16: 0, C18: 1v9c and C17: 1v8c as the major fatty acids. The G+C content of the genomic DNA of the novel strain was 73.0 mol%. These chemotaxonomic properties supported the placement of strain Gsoil 346T in the genus Nocardioides. The results of physiological and biochemical tests, along with the phylogenetic analysis, allowed strain Gsoil 346T to be differentiated genotypically and phenotypically fro