sp. nov. () as a replacement of the species '' Harwich . 2012 and '' Shukla . 2002, and emended description of Collins . 2001.

Members of the genus are fastidious bacteria that predominantly colonise the female genital tract and are significantly associated with reproductive disorders and genital and neonatal disease. From a taxonomical perspective, the genus only comprises the species . Numerous reports on a second species, '', have been published, but the name has never been validated. The same is the case for '', which was previously shown to belong to the same species as ''. We studied strains DSM 16631 and DSM 16630, which have been identified and deposited as '' previously. At the time of isolation, these strains were found to be most closely related to, but clearly different from, based on 16S rRNA gene sequence similarities. Both strains proved to be almost indistinguishable from '' based on molecular, morphological and physiological traits. The 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis revealed that strain DSM 16631 was assigned to the genus with a sequence similarity of 95.47 % to CCUG 41628, followed by type strains of (93.03 %), (92.68 %) and (91.97 %) as the next closely related members of the . The novel species was also clearly differentiated from other related taxa by core genome phylogeny, average nucleotide and amino acid identities, DNA-DNA hybridization and MALDI-TOF MS. With respect to chemotaxonomic and physiological patterns, strains DSM 16631 and DSM 16630 were again highly similar to . On the basis of these data, we propose the novel species sp. nov. with the type strain DSM 16631 (=CCUG 52977=CCUG 52889A) and a second strain DSM 16630 (=CCUG 52976=CCUG 52888) that were both isolated from bloodstream infections in women with puerperal fever in France. The G+C content of the DNA of the type strain is 28.4 mol% and the genome size is 1.28 Mbp. Based on the observed extremely high similarities of genotypic and phenotypic traits of the novel proposed species to those reported for '', we recommend using this new name in all further publications on this taxon.