Vibrio panuliri sp. nov., a marine bacterium isolated from spiny lobster, Panulirus penicillatus and transfer of Vibrio ponticus from Scophthalmi clade to the newly proposed Ponticus clade.

A novel marine bacterium, strain LBS2(T) was isolated from eggs carried on pleopods of the spiny lobster collected from Andaman Sea. Heterotrophic growth occurred at 1-7% NaCl. 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity revealed the strain LBS2(T) belonged to the genus Vibrio and showed above 97% similarity with eight type strains of the genus Vibrio. Multilocus analysis based on ftsZ, gapA, gyrB, mreB, pyrH recA, rpoA, and topA revealed LBS2(T) formed a separate cluster with Vibrio ponticus DSM 16217(T) with 89.8% multilocus gene sequence similarity. However, strain LBS2(T) is distantly related with other members of the Scophthalmi clade in terms of 16S rRNA signatures, phenotypic variations and multilocus gene sequence similarity, for which we propose LBS2(T) belongs to a new clade i.e. Ponticus clade with V. ponticus DSM 16217(T) as the representative type strain of the clade. DNA-DNA homologies between strain LBS2(T) and closely related strains were well below 70%. DNA G + C content was 45.3 mol%. On the basis of our polyphasic study, strain LBS2(T) represents a novel species of the genus Vibrio, for which the name Vibrio panuliri sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is LBS2(T) (= JCM 19500(T) = DSM 27724(T) = LMG 27902(T)).