Pedobacter gandavensis sp. nov., Pedobacter foliorum sp. nov. and Pedobacter planticolens sp. nov., isolated from leaves of Arabidopsis thaliana

Three rod-shaped, non-spore-forming, yellow or pale-yellow pigmented bacteria with distinct MALDI-TOF mass spectra were isolated from the phyllosphere of Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings. Their 16S rRNA gene sequences demonstrated that these isolates belong to the genus Pedobacter. The nearest phylogenetic neighbours of strain LMG 31462(T) were Pedobacter steynii DSM 19110(T) (98.3 % 16S rRNA sequence similarity) and Pedobacter caeni LMG 22862(T) (98.3 %); the nearest phylogenetic neighbours of strain LMG 31463(T) were Pedobacter panaciterrae Gsoil 042(T) (98.3 %) and Pedobacter nutrimenti DSM 27372(T) (98.1 %); and the nearest phylogenetic neighbours of strain LMG 31464(T) were Pedobacter boryungensis BR-9(T) (99.0 %) and Pedobacter daejeonensis THG-DN3.18(T) (98.7 %). Average nucleotide identity analyses between the whole genome sequences of the three strains and of the type strains of their respective nearest-neighbour taxa yielded values well below the species delineation threshold and thus confirmed that the three strains represented a novel Pedobacter species each. An extensive phenotypic comparison and an analysis of whole-cell fatty acid components yielded distinctive phenotypic characteristics for each of these strains. We therefore propose to classify these isolates as three novel species, for which we propose the names Pedobacter gandavensis with LMG 31462(T) (=R-74704(T)=CECT 30149(T)) as the type strain, Pedobacter foliorum with LMG 31463(T) (=R-74623(T)=CECT 30150(T)) as the type strain and Pedobacter planticolens with LMG 31464T (=R-74626(T)=CECT 30151(T)) as the type strain.