Spirosoma pollinicola sp. nov., isolated from pollen of common hazel (Corylus avellana L.).

A Gram-negative bacterium, strain HA7T, was isolated from the microhabitat of common hazel (Corylus avellana L.) pollen. HA7T was found to be an aerobic, rod-shaped, catalase-positive, oxidase-negative bacterium with an optimum growth temperature of 25 °C and pH of 7. The nearly complete 16S rRNA gene sequence of HA7T strain showed the closest similarities to Spirosoma linguale DSM 74T (97.4 %) and Spirosoma fluviale DSM 29961T (97.43 %). The major fatty acids (>5 %) were C16 : 1ω5c, summed feature 3 (C16 : 1ω7c and/or iso-C15 : 0 2-OH), iso-C15 : 0 and iso-C17 : 0 3-OH. The major polar lipids were an unidentified aminophospholipid and phosphatidylethanolamine. The major respiratory quinone detected was menaquinone MK-7 (95 %). The draft genome sequence included 8 794 837 bases, which contained 3665 predicted coding sequences and had a G+C content of 47.9 mol%. The genome-based comparison between HA7T and S. linguale DSM 74T and S. fluviale DSM 29961T with pairwise average nucleotide identity indicated a clear distinction, between 76.2-76.3 %. Moreover, the digital DNA-DNA relatedness of HA7T to these strains was 26.5 and 25.1 %. Based on the differential genotypic, phenotypic and chemotaxonomic properties to closely related type strains, strain HA7T ought to be assigned with the status of a new species, for which the name Spirosomapollinicola sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is HA7T (DSM 105799T=LMG 30282T).