Rhizobium gei sp. nov., a bacterial endophyte of Geum aleppicum

A bacterial strain, designated as ZFJT-2T, was isolated from the stem of Geum aleppicum Jacq. collected from Taibai Mountain in Shaanxi Province, north-west China. Cells of strain ZFJT-2T were Gram-stain-negative, strictly aerobic, rod-shaped and motile by means of a single polar flagellum. The major fatty acids were summed feature 8 (comprising C18 : 1ω7c and/or C18 : 1ω6c), C16 : 0, 11-methyl C18 : 1ω7c and summed feature 3 (comprising C16 : 1ω7c and/or C16 : 1ω6c), and the DNA G+C content was 58.3 mol% (HPLC). Phylogenetic analyses based on 16S rRNA gene sequences showed that strain ZFJT-2T was a member of the genus Rhizobium and was most closely related to Rhizobium giardinii KACC 10720T (98.6 % similarity) and Rhizobium herbae CCBAU 83011T (98.5 %). The low levels of sequence similarity found between the atpD, recA and glnII gene sequences of strain ZFJT-2T and those of recognized species of the genus Rhizobium (no more than 94.4, 87.2 and 89.5 %, respectively) indicated that it may represent a separate species of the genus Rhizobium. The DNA-DNA relatedness values for strain ZFJT-2T with respect to R. giardinii KACC 10720T and R. herbae CCBAU 83011T were 17.6 and 41.9 %, respectively. On the basis of phenotypic, phylogenetic and genotypic data, strain ZFJT-2T is considered to represent a novel species of the genus Rhizobium, for which the name Rhizobium gei sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is ZFJT-2T (=CCTCC AB 2013015T=KCTC 32301T=LMG 27603T).