Campylobacter hyoilei sp. nov., associated with porcine proliferative enteritis.

Campylobacter hyoilei sp. nov. is the name proposed for an organism formerly described as strain RMIT 32AT (T = type strain) and a group of similar bacteria isolated from intestinal lesions of pigs with proliferative enteritis. The phenotypic characteristics of these organisms indicated that they are closely related to each other and are not strains of other Campylobacter spp. commonly isolated from pigs. The results of probing of ClaI-, EcoRV-, or BglII-cleaved genomic DNAs from C. hyoilei strains with a radiolabeled DNA probe that distinguishes between Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli indicated that C. hyoilei and C. coli are closely related. However, the 16S rRNA sequence of the reference strain of C. hyoilei, RMIT 32AT, was four bases different from the 16S rRNA sequence of C. jejuni CCUG 11284T and five bases different from the 16S rRNA sequence of C. jejuni subsp. doylei CCUG 24567T, suggesting that C. hyoilei is more closely related to C. jejuni than to C. coli. Hybridization between DNA from C. hyoilei type strain RMIT 32A and DNAs from selected type and reference strains of other Campylobacter species and subspecies, including C. jejuni, C. jejuni subsp. doylei, C. coli, Campylobacter mucosalis, and Campylobacter hyointestinalis, as well as the other C. hyoilei strains (the RMIT 32AT-like isolates), revealed that high levels of DNA hybridization (> 70%) occurred only between the reference strain and other strains of C. hyoilei.