sp. nov., a non-infective non-nitrogen-fixing isolate from root nodules of Wall.

Strains CN4, CN6, CN7 and CNm7 were isolated from root nodules of from Murree in Pakistan. They do not form root nodules on nor on although they deformed root hairs of . The colonies are bright red-pigmented, the strains form hyphae and sporangia but no N-fixing vesicles and do not fix nitrogen . The peptidoglycan of strain CN4 contains -diaminopimelic acid; whole cell sugars consist of ribose, mannose, glucose, galactose and rhamnose. Diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylinositol and two unknown lipids represent the major polar lipids; MK-9(H) and MK-9(H) are the predominant menaquinones (>15 %), and iso-C and Cω8 are the major fatty acids (>15 %). The results of comparative 16S rRNA gene sequence analyses indicated that strain CN4 is most closely related to CN 3. An MLSA phylogeny using amino acids sequences of AtpD, DnaA, FtsZ, Pgk and RpoB, assigned the strain to cluster 4 non-nodulating species, close to CN 3 M16386 and EuI1c with 0.04 substitutions per site, while that value was 0.075 with other strains. Digital DNA-DNA hybridization (dDDH) and average nucleotide identity (ANI) values between CN4 and all species of the genus with validly published names were below the defined threshold for prokaryotic species demarcation, with dDDH and ANI values at or below 27.8 and 83.7 %, respectively. The four strains CN4, CN6, CN7 and CNm7 had dDDH (98.6-99.6 %) and ANI values that grouped them as representing a single species. CN4 has a 10.76 Mb genome. CN4 was different from its close phylogenetic neighbours with validly published names in being red-pigmented, in having several lantibiotic-coding clusters, a carbon monoxide dehydrogenase cluster and a clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) cluster. The results of phenotypic, physiological and phylogenomic analyses confirmed the assignment of strain CN4 (=DSM 114740 = LMG 32595) to a novel species, with CN4 as type strain, for which the name sp. nov. is proposed.