A taxonomic study was performed on strain HR1 T , which was isolated from a desert soil sample collected from Xinjiang Province (China). Cells were aerobic, Gram-positive-staining, pinkpigmented, sporulating rods with a single lateral flagellum. The organism can grow at 15-42 6C and pH 5.0-10.0, optimally at 30-37 6C and pH 6.0-8.0. Growth is inhibited by 6 % NaCl. Analysis of almost-complete 16S rRNA gene sequence revealed that the isolate represents a distinct taxon within the genus Saccharibacillus; Saccharibacillus sacchari LMG 24085T was the nearest relative (97.9 % sequence similarity). DNA-DNA hybridization showed 29.6 % genetic relatedness between strain HR1 T and S. sacchari LMG 24085T . The major isoprenoid quinone was MK-7 and the predominant fatty acid was anteiso-C 15 : 0 (50.3 %). The G+C content of the DNA was 50.5 mol%. Therefore, based on phenotypic criteria and the phylogenetic position, strain HR1T belongs to a previously unidentified species of the genus Saccharibacillus, for which the name Saccharibacillus kuerlensis sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is HR1 T (5KCTCThe genus Saccharibacillus of the family 'Paenibacillaceae' was first proposed by Rivas et al. (2008) to include a Gramvariable, facultatively anaerobic, motile and rod-shaped bacterium that was negative for catalase and oxidase activities and that had anteiso-C 15 : 0 as the main fatty acid and menaquinone-7 as the major respiratory menaquinone. At present, the genus comprises only one species, Saccharibacillus sacchari.In our search for organisms capable of growing in desert ecosystems, a bacterial strain, designated HR1 T , was isolated from a soil sample collected from the southern desert of Kuerle (41 u 469 N 86 u 079 E), a city at the heart of Xinjiang, the most westerly province of China. The combination of phenotypic and chemotaxonomic characteristics, phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequences and DNA-DNA hybridization showed that strain HR1T is a representative of a novel species of the genus Saccharibacillus.
Strain HR1T was isolated using the standard dilutionplating technique on Luria-Bertani (LB) agar medium. The isolate was cultivated routinely on LB agar at 30 u C under aerobic conditions and maintained as a glycerol suspension (20 %, w/v) at 270 u C. Biomass for molecular systematic and chemotaxonomic studies was obtained by culturing strain HR1T in liquid LB medium and harvesting the cells by centrifugation.Amplification and sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene was performed as described by Cui et al. (2001). The sequence obtained was compared with available 16S rRNA gene sequences retrieved from GenBank using the BLAST program (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/) to determine an approximate phylogenetic affiliation. Phylogenetic analysis was performed using the software packages PHYLIP (Felsenstein, 1993) and MEGA version 3.1 (Kumar et al., 2001) after multiple alignment of the data by CLUSTAL_X (Thompson et al., 1997). Distances (distance options according to Kimura's two-parameter model; Kimura, ...