A Gram-stain-positive bacterial strain, 11097T , was isolated from traditional pickle in Heilongjiang Province, China. The bacterium was characterized using a polyphasic approach, including 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis, phenylalanyl-tRNA synthase (pheS) gene sequence analysis, RNA polymerase a subunit (rpoA) gene sequence analysis, fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) analysis, determination of DNA G+C content, DNA-DNA hybridization and an analysis of phenotypic features. As a traditional fermented food, pickle is rich in lactic acid bacteria. During the past ten years, about 20 novel lactic acid bacterial species have been isolated and identified from Korean pickle, Japanese pickle and Chinese pickle. These novel lactic acid bacterial species belong to the genera Lactobacillus, Leuconostoc and Weissella. In the present study, a novel bacterial strain (11097 T ) of the genus Enterococcus was isolated from traditional pickle in Heilongjiang Province, China and characterized using a polyphasic approach. The genus Enterococcus is the type genus of the family Enterococcaceae and enterococci belong to the lactic acid bacteria. Strains used in this study are listed in Table 1. Reference strains are type strains of phylogenetically related species. All strains were incubated aerobically at 30 u C on mMRS (modified MRS) medium (Gu et al., 2013). DNA for gene amplification was prepared using genomic DNA extraction kits (TIANGEN). Amplification of the 16S rRNA gene was performed using the primers of An et al. (2006). The phenylalanyl-tRNA synthase (pheS) and RNA polymerase a subunit (rpoA) genes were amplified using the primers of De Bruyne et al. (2007) and the protocols of Naser et al. (2005). Purification and sequencing of PCR products were carried out by the Shenggong Company in Shanghai, China. The resulting sequences, together with those of related strains obtained from the GenBank database were aligned by using the CLUSTAL W program. Phylogenetic trees were reconstructed using the neighbour-joining method and minimum-evolution method with maximum composite likelihood model. Bootstrap analysis was performed based on 1000 replicates. The MEGA5 software package (Tamura et al., 2011) (Figs 3 and S3) clearly show a higher resolution than the 16S rRNA gene Abbreviation: FAME, fatty acid methyl ester.The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession numbers for the 16S rRNA, pheS and rpoA gene sequences of strain 11097 T are HF679036, HF679043 and HF679047, respectively.