A Gram-stain-positive bacterial strain, designated G127ATT, was isolated as soft small white colonies from the hindgut of the cockroach Archimandrita tesselata. Examination of the complete 16S rRNA sequence mapped the strain to the genus Agromyces. The type strain with the highest pairwise similarity was Agromyces marinus H23-8T (97.3%). The genome of G127ATT was sequenced by a combination of Illumina and Nanopore methods and consisted of a single circular DNA molecule with a size of 3.45 Mb. The DNA G+C content was 71.3 mol%. A phylogenomic tree based on conserved single copy housekeeping genes, placed G127ATT among the ancestral species of the genus Agromyces, and only Agromyces atrinae P27T was found to diverge earlier than G127ATT. Genome distance metrics average nucleotide identity (ANI) (76-78 %) and digital DNA-DNA hybridization (dDDH) (20.2-21.5 %) of the isolate against available genomes of several type strains of species of the genus Agromyces indicated that G127ATT represented a previously undescribed species of the genus Agromyces. Morphological, physiological and biochemical characteristics, including lipid profile, cellular fatty acids and peptidoglycan type were in accordance with usual attributes of members of the genus Agromyces. The novel isolate could be differentiated from the most closely related species by extracellular expression of acid and alkaline phosphatases, trypsin and α-chymotrypsin, and utilization of l-arabinose and salicin as sole carbon sources. On the basis of the combined genomic and phenotypic features, isolate G127ATT (=DSM 111850T=LMG 32099T) is considered to represent a novel species of the genus Agromyces, for which we propose the name Agromyces archimandritae sp. nov.
Keywords: Agromyces archimandritae; Archimandrita tesselata; Microbacteriaceae; cockroach microbiota.