A novel actinobacterial strain, designated 16K104T, was isolated from desert soil collected from the Karakum Desert and characterized using a polyphasic approach to clarify its taxonomic position. Strain 16K104T was found to have chemotaxonomic and morphological properties consistent with classification in the genus Kribbella. The strain shared the highest 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity with Kribbella albertanoniae BC640T (99.2 %), and formed a branch with Kribbella antibiotica YIM 31530T in the 16S rRNA gene phylogenetic tree. Multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) using five housekeeping genes (gyrB, rpoB, relA, recA and atpD) for comparing the strain with all Kribbella type strains showed that the MLSA distances of strain 16K104T to the closely related type strains of the genus were much higher than the 0.04 threshold. The organism was found to contain ll-diaminopimelic acid as the diagnostic diamino acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan. The whole-cell sugars were identified as ribose and glucose. The major polar lipids were diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylglycerol and phosphatidylinositol. The predominant menaquinone was MK-9(H4). The major fatty acids were iso-C16 : 0, anteiso-C15:0, iso-C15 : 0 and iso-C17 : 0. The results of digital DNA-DNA hybridization and average nucleotide identity analyses, in addition to MLSA phylogenetic distances, confirmed that the strain represents a novel species of the genus Kribbella, for which the name Kribbella turkmenica sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is 16K104T (=JCM 32914T=KCTC 49224T).
Keywords: Karakum Desert; Kribbella; Phylogenomics; Polyphasic taxonomy.