Sphingomonas montana sp. nov., isolated from a soil sample from the Tanggula Mountain in the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau.

An orange pigmented, Gram-staining negative, aerobic, motile, rod-shaped bacterium isolated from a soil from the Tanggula Mountain, China was studied using a polyphasic approach. Based on 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity, strain W16RD was found to be closely related to Sphingomonas prati DSM 103336 (99%), Sphingomonas fennica DSM 13665 (97.21%), followed by Sphingomonas laterariae DSM 25432 (96.44%), Sphingomonas haloaromaticamans CGMCC 1.10206 (96.36%) and Sphingomonas formosensis DSM 24164 (96.06%). The strain was found to be catalase and oxidase positive and was found to grow optimally at temperatures of 20-25 °C, pH 8 and tolerated NaCl concentration up to 1% (w/v). The major fatty acids identified were summed feature eight comprising C ω 7c and/or C ω 6c (39.2%), summed feature three comprising of C ω7c and/or C ω6c (36.7%) and C (7.0%). The polar lipids detected were phosphatidylcholine, sphingoglycolipid, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidyldimethylethanolamine, phosphatidylmonomethylethanolamine, and three unidentified lipids. The strain possessed ubiquinone-10 (Q-10) as the predominant respiratory quinone. Along with other distinguishing characteristics, we also describe the draft genome of strain W16RD. The final assembled draft genome sequence is 3,722,743 bp with 3390 coding and 48 RNA (45 tRNA and 3 rRNA) genes. The DNA G+C content of the genomic DNA was determined to be 67%. The DNA-DNA relatedness value between the strain W16RD and its closest phylogenetic relatives S. prati DSM 103336, S. fennica DSM 13665, S. laterariae DSM 25432, and S. haloaromaticamans CGMCC 1.10206 were 52.17, 47.60, 20.93 and 17.09% respectively. The strain W16RD could be distinguished genotypically and phenotypically from the recognized species belonging to the genus Sphingomonas and thus represents a novel species, for which the name Sphingomonas montana sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is W16RD (=CGMCC 1.15646 = DSM 103337).