0% to the 16S Bcl-2 inhibitor rRNA gene sequence of strain MSSRF38T. The topology of the phylogenetic tree built using the maximum-parsimony algorithm was similar to those of the tree constructed using neighbour-joining analysis (Fig. 1). Recently, sequencing of housekeeping genes has been proved to be useful to determine the phylogenetic relationships among microorganisms. For the family Vibrionaceae, different loci, for example gapA, gyrB, recA, rpoA, pyrH, atpA and dnaJ, have been studied in the search for a useful phylogenetic marker capable of delineating Vibrio species (Thompson et al.,

2005; Ramesh Kumar & Nair, 2007; Sawabe et al., 2007; Rameshkumar et al., 2008). For the present analysis, we used four housekeeping genes, ftsZ, gyrB, gapA and mreB, in order to verify the taxonomic position of strain MSSRF38T. The phylogenetic tree based on ftsZ, gyrB,

gapA and mreB gene sequences confirmed the clustering of strain MSSRF38T along with the type strains of species of the V. gazogenes group with high bootstrap support values and revealed its distinct phylogenetic position (Figs S1–S4). Furthermore, sequence analysis of ftsZ, gyrB, gapA and mreB genes showed that strain MSSRF38T had relatively low gene similarities (<92%, <87%, <90% and <86%) to its closest relatives (Table 1), as all these similarity values were lower than the intraspecies variation in the genus Vibrio (Sawabe et al., 2007), indicating a separate species status for strain MSSRF38T. In addition, a multigene phylogenetic tree was constructed for strain MSSRF38T using these four genes (mreB, gyrB, gapA and ftsZ). This analysis also showed that the selleck compound strain MSSRF38T occupies a distinct phylogenetic position by not clustering with any type strain of the V. gazogenes group (Fig. 2). This result again reinforced our conclusion that strain MSSRF38T deserves the status of a separate species. Supporting our taxonomic conclusion on strain MSSRF38T, the level

of DNA relatedness between strain MSSRF38T and V. ruber DSM 16370T was 27.4% Protirelin (27.8%) and that between strain MSSRF38T and V. rhizosphaerae DSM 18581T was 12.1% (17.4%). The values in parentheses are the results of measurements in duplicate. This level of DNA relatedness is well below the recommended 70% genomic relatedness used to delineate species (Wayne et al., 1987). It can be concluded that strain MSSRF38T does not belong to those species. Because it was found that species with <97% similarity at the 16S rRNA gene sequence level show <70% genomic relatedness (Stackebrandt & Goebel, 1994), DNA–DNA hybridization with the type strains of other species of the V. gazogenes group was not included. Our study further confirms the fact that Vibrio strains that have housekeeping gene similarities lower than 95% (recA, pyrH, rpoA, mreB, gyrB, gapA and ftsZ) will have <70% DNA–DNA similarity (Thompson et al., 2004, 2005; Ramesh Kumar & Nair, 2007; Sawabe et al.