Nocardiopsis ansamitocini sp. nov., a new producer of ansamitocin P-3 of the genus Nocardiopsis The genus Nocardiopsis was first proposed by Meyer (1976), and later affiliated with the family Nocardiopsaceae (Rainey et al., 1996). At time of writing, the genus comprised 38 recognized species and two subspecies (http://www. bacterio.net/nocardiopsis.html), although Nocardiopsis arabia was recently reclassified as Streptomonospora arabica (Zhang et al., 2013). Novel species of the genus Nocardiopsis are increasingly being reported, such as Nocardiopsis algeriensis (Bouras et al., 2015), Nocardiopsis mangrovei (Huang et al., 2015), and Nocardiopsis oceani and Nocardiopsis nanhaiensis (Pan et al., 2015). Nocardiopsis species harbour characteristic features: the substrate mycelium may fragment into rods or cocci, production of aerial hyphae varies from sparse to abundant, and the cell wall contains 2,6-mesodiaminopimelic acid (meso-DAP) but no diagnostic sugar (Meyer, 1976). Most members of the genus Nocardiopsis are from saline or alkaline environments, and may adopt complicated hyphal differentiations to adapt to these extreme environments, by which they acquire the ability to form some bioactive products (Horikoshi, 1999;Ding et al., 2010Ding et al., , 2012 Bérdy, 2012). During research into Actinobacteria with application in biotechnology, a 3-amino-5-hydroxybenzoate (AHBA) synthase gene PCR screen-positive strain, designated EGI 80425 T , was found to form ansamitocin P-3, an anti-tumour metabolite, which has been reported to be produced by Actinosynnema pretiosum subsp. pretiosum No. C-15003 (Higashide et al., 1977), 'Claopodium crispifolium', 'Anomodon attenuatus' and related actinomycetes (Suwanborirux et al., 1990). In this study, strain EGI Abbreviations: meso-DAP, 2,6-meso-diaminopimelic acid.