Abstract
We describe a new species of purple sulfur bacteria (Chromatiaceae, anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria) isolated from a microbial mat in the sulfidic geothermal outflow of a hot spring in Rotorua, New Zealand. This phototroph, designated as strain NZ, grew optimally near 45 °C but did not show an absorption maximum at 915 nm for the light-harvesting-reaction center core complex (LH1-RC) characteristic of other thermophilic purple sulfur bacteria. Strain NZ had a similar carotenoid composition as Thermochromatium tepidum, but unlike Tch. tepidum, grew photoheterotrophically on acetate in the absence of sulfide and metabolized thiosulfate. The genome of strain NZ was significantly larger than that of Tch. tepidum but slightly smaller than that of Allochromatium vinosum. Strain NZ was phylogenetically more closely related to mesophilic purple sulfur bacteria of the genus Allochromatium than to Tch. tepidum. This conclusion was reached from phylogenetic analyses of strain NZ genes encoding 16S rRNA and the photosynthetic functional gene pufM, from phylogenetic analyses of entire genomes, and from a phylogenetic tree constructed from the concatenated sequence of 1090 orthologous proteins. Moreover, average nucleotide identities and digital DNA:DNA hybridizations of the strain NZ genome against those of related species of Chromatiaceae supported the phylogenetic analyses. From this collection of properties, we describe strain NZ here as the first thermophilic species of the genus Allochromatium, Allochromatium tepidum NZT, sp. nov.
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11 March 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-022-02827-8
Abbreviations
- Tch. :
-
Thermochromatium
- Alc.:
-
Allochromatium
- Ccm. :
-
Caldichromatium
- Cba.:
-
Chlorobaculum
- Bchl:
-
Bacteriochlorophyll
- LH:
-
Light-harvesting
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Acknowledgements
We thank Steven Schmitt, SIUC Electron Microscopy Center, for the electron micrographs, and Dr. Scott Hamilton-Brehm for supplying supplemental H2 for growth experiments.
Funding
This work was supported in part by NASA Exobiology grant 80NSSC17M0071 to MTM and by JSPS KAKENHI grant number 19H02018 to YT.
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Communicated by Erko Stackebrandt.
This article is dedicated to the memory of Thomas D. Brock who first introduced microbiology to the fascinating microbial diversity of geothermal environments.
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Allochromatium tepidum strain NZT 16S rRNA gene sequence, AF384209; complete genome sequence, AP024563, AP024564; culture accession numbers, DSM 26924 and JCM 33379.
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Madigan, M.T., Absher, J.N., Mayers, J.E. et al. Allochromatium tepidum, sp. nov., a hot spring species of purple sulfur bacteria. Arch Microbiol 204, 115 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-021-02715-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-021-02715-7