sp. nov., isolated from a water sample of a salt lake in India.

A strictly aerobic, alkaliphilic, Gram-stain-positive, motile, rod-shaped bacterium, designated strain AK74, was isolated from a water sample collected from Sambhar salt lake, Rajasthan, India. Colonies were circular, 1.2 mm in diameter, shiny, smooth, whitish and convex with an entire margin after 48 h growth at 37 °C with pH 9.0. Growth occurred at 25-42 °C, 0-4 % (w/v) NaCl and at a pH of 7-12. Strain AK74 was positive for aesculinase, caseinase, lipase activities and negative for oxidase, catalase, amylase, cellulase, DNase, gelatinase and urease activities. The fatty acids were dominated by branched iso-, anteiso- and saturated fatty acids with a high abundance of iso-C, anteiso-C, C and C and the cell-wall peptidoglycan contained -diaminopimelic acid as the diagnostic diamino acid. The DNA G+C content of strain AK74 was 51.6 mol%. A blast sequence similarity search based on 16S rRNA gene sequences indicated that , and were the nearest phylogenetic neighbours, with a pair-wise sequence similarities of 96.6, 96.6 and 96.5%, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis showed that strain AK74 clustered with and together clustered with and . Based on its phenotypic characteristics and on phylogenetic inference, strain AK74 represents a novel species of the genus , for which the name sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is AK74 (=MTCC 12638=KCTC 33946=JCM 32185).