“…Nevertheless, the position of these bacteria within the Bradyrhizobium group is unclear. Within the Bradyrhizobium group, two major clusters can be distinguished : one that includes Bradyrhizobium elkanii (Kuykendall et al, 1992) and Afipia genospecies 1 and 2 (Brenner et al, 1991) and the other including Bradyrhizobium japonicum and Bradyrhizobium liaoningense (Jordan, 1982 ;Xu et al, 1995), all other Afipia species and members of the genera Nitrobacter (Grundmann et al, 2000 ;Navarro et al, 1992 ;Orso et al, 1994 ;Sorokin et al, 1998), Agromonas (Ohta & Hattori, 1983), Blastobacter (Hirsch & Mu$ ller, 1985) and Rhodopseudomonas (Hougardy et al, 2000). Moreover, several 16S rRNA gene sequences of Afipia genospecies available in GenBank (Afipia genospecies 4-14), for which no description or strain is available, are distributed among very distant groups.…”