Asanoa hainanensis sp. nov., isolated from rhizosphere soil of Acrostichum speciosum in a mangrove, and emended description of the genus Asanoa Asanoa were below the 70 % threshold recommended for distinguishing bacterial genomic species. The novel isolate contained glutamic acid, glycine, alanine and meso-A 2 pm as cell-wall amino acids, indicating peptidoglycan type A1c. The characteristic whole-cell sugars were xylose, ribose, glucose and mannose. The predominant menaquinones were MK-9(H 4 ), MK-9(H 6 ) and MK-9(H 8 ). The major fatty acids were iso-C 16 : 0 (30.9 %), C 17 : 0 (23.0 %), anteiso-C 15 : 0 (14.9 %) and iso-C 15 : 0 (12.3 %). The phospholipid profile comprised phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylinositol mannosides and phospholipids of unknown structure containing glucosamine. The G+C content of the DNA was 70.3 mol%. On the basis of the phenotypic and genotypic data, strain 210121 T (5CGMCC 4.5593represents a novel species of the genus Asanoa, for which the name Asanoa hainanensis sp. nov., is proposed. An emended description of the genus Asanoa is also proposed.The genus Asanoa belongs to the family Micromonosporaceae and, at the time of writing, contained three species: Asanoa ferruginea (basonym Catellatospora ferruginea; Asano and Kawamoto, 1986), Asanoa ishikariensis (formerly Catellatospora ishikariense; Lee & Hah, 2002) and Asanoa iriomotensis. A. iriomotensis was isolated from rhizosphere soil of an oriental mangrove tree, Bruguiera gymnorrhiza (Tamura & Sakane, 2005). The rhizosphere of mangroves has proven to be a good source of novel actinobacteria (Hatano, 1997;Takeuchi & Hatano, 1998, 1999Wang et al., 2011).Strain 210121 T was isolated from a rhizosphere soil sample of the mangrove fern Acrostichum speciosum collected in Hainan Province, China, (19 u 37.5289 N 110 u 47.6019 E), during an investigation of actinobacteria in mangroves (Hong et al., 2009). A 1 g sample of soil was heated in a hot air oven at 100 u C for 60 min and diluted 610 22 with quarter-strength Ringer's solution (King & Hurst, 1963) before sonicating for 10 min in order to disperse the soil (Janssen et al., 2002). Then 100 ml volumes of the suspension were inoculated on to agar plates of glucose-asparaginevitamin medium (Takahashi et al., 1996) ). After 21 days of aerobic incubation at 28 u C, the isolate, which formed little orange colonies, was transferred and purified on yeast extract-malt extract (International Streptomyces Project, ISP 2) agar (Shirling & Gottlieb, 1966) and maintained as slopes at 4 u C for short-term preservation and as glycerol suspensions (20 %, v/v) at 220 u C for long-term preservation (Wellington & Williams, 1978).Morphological characteristics were observed using light microscopy (80i, Nikon) and scanning electron microscopy 3Present address: