Pengzhenrongella sicca gen. nov., sp. nov., a new member of suborder Micrococcineae isolated from High-Arctic tundra soil

 2022.11.3.

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un said:

"The basic sciences are the cornerstone of a sci-tech power. A high level of basic sciences enables a country's science and technology to make steady progress on a solid foundation."

The actinobacteria are widespread in nature and are able to occupy extreme habitats, such as saline soil, arctic soil, desert regions and hot springs. Actinobacteria have the biotechnologically important secondary metabolites and play an important role in decomposition of hazardous chemical compounds in nature; therefore, many microbiologists have focused on actinomycetes. While isolating bacteria from arctic tundra soil sample, we isolated a novel actinobacterium, strain LRZ-2T.

A yellow bacterial strain, designated LRZ-2T, was isolated from a High-Arctic tundra near the settlement Ny-Ålesund in the Svalbard Archipelago, Norway. The cells are Gram-stain positive, aerobic and non-sporulation.

The almost complete 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain LRZ-2T determined in this study comprised 1445 bp. Comparative 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis indicated that strain LRZ-2T showed highest similarities to Luteimicrobium album RI148-Li105T (96.9 %). The neighbor-joining tree revealed that strain LRZ-2T formed a distinct monophyletic clade at the base of a cluster containing the genera Luteimicrobium, Celluolomonas, Oerskovia, Actinotalea, Georgenia, Sanguibacter, Pseudactinotalea and Bogoriella belonged to different families within the suborder Micrococcineae, which also was showed in the maximum-parsimony and maximum-likelihood trees.

Genome sequencing of strain LRZ-2T yielded a genome of 4 395 128bp in length with the DNA G+C content of 72.4 mol% after assembly. The ANI and dDDH values between the genomes of strain LRZ-2T and closely related strains were 77.4-74.3 % and 21.4-19.6 %, respectively, which were lower than the species threshold of 95-96%. In the whole genome based CV phylogenomic tree, strain LRZ-2T formed a coherent cluster with species of the genus Cellulomonas. The Whole Genome project has been deposited at GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ/PIR under the accession CP071868.

The peptidoglycan type of the isolate was A4β with an interpeptide bridge comprising L-ornithine and D-glutamic acid. The predominant menaquinone was MK-9 (H4) and the major fatty acids were anteiso-C15:0, C16:0, anteiso-C15:1 A, anteiso-C17:0 and iso-C15:0. The polar lipids were diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylinositol, phosphatidylinositol mannoside, phosphatidylinositol dimannoside, unidentified phosphoglycolipid, four unidentified phospholipids and two unidentified polar lipids.

On the basis of the phylogenetic, phenotypic and chemotaxonomic analysis, strain LRZ-2T is considered to represent a novel species of a new genus, for which the name Pengzhenrongella sicca gen. nov., sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain of Pengzhenrongella sicca is LRZ-2T (=CCTCC AB 2012163T=DSM 100332T). The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ/PIR accession number for 16S rRNA gene and the genome sequence of strain LRZ-2T are KP408225 and CP071868, respectively.

We have published these results as the paper entitled "Pengzhenrongella sicca gen. nov., sp. nov., a new member of suborder Micrococcineae isolated from High-Arctic tundra soil" (https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.004988) on "International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology" (Vol. 71, 2021).