Candida rishirensis sp. nov., a novel methylotrophic anamorphic yeast species isolated from soil on Rishiri Island in Japan

Abstract

Since the fi rst report of methanol-assimilating yeast by Ogata et al. (1969), a number of methanol-assimilating yeast species were reported. The majority of these yeast species are distributed into three clades, the Ogataea, the Kuraishia and the Komagataella, in the phylogenetic trees constructed from nucleic acid sequences (Péter et al., 2008a). In addition, all of the anamorphic methylotrophic yeast species are now placed in the genus Candida, most of which are closely related to the three teleomorphic genera mentioned above. Among these Candida species, the phylogenetic position of Candida pignaliae is not clear. Nagatsuka et al. (2008) reported that all of described species of the genus Ogataea excluding Ogataea nitratoversa (Péter et al., 2008b), three Pichia species and those anamorphic Candida species formed a cluster, the Ogataea cluster, in neighbor-joining and maximum parsimony trees based on the D1/D2 sequences of large-subunit (LSU) rRNA genes, and O. nitratoversa was included in the Pichia methanolica cluster. In their tree, C. pignaliae does not show a close relationship to any known species.During the course of a study of biodiversity of yeasts on Rishiri-tou (Rishiri Island), a small island located in the Japan Sea, two methylotrophic yeast strains, Y07-901-4 and Y07-901-7, were isolated from soil in a pine forest on Mt. Pon, in July 2007, by enrichment culture in media consisting of malt extract (5%), glucose (3%), chloramphenicol (100 μg/ml) and tetracycline (100 μg/ml), with pH 3.7. The two strains are closely related to C. pignaliae in the D1/D2 sequences of LSU rRNA genes but clearly separated from this species by phenotypic or genetic properties. They are described as Candida rishirensis sp. nov. in the present paper.Most of the morphological, physiological, and biochemical characteristics were examined by the methods described by Yarrow (1998). The maximum growth temperature was determined in YM broth using metal block baths at 1 C intervals. The ubiquinone system was analyzed according to the method described by Mikata and Yamada (1999). Nuclear DNA was isolated and purifi ed according to Holm et al. (1986). The DNA base composition was determined by HPLC after enzymatic digestion of DNA to deoxyribonucleosides as described by Tamaoka and Komagata (1984) using a DNA-GC Kit (Yamasa Shoyu Co., Ltd., Chiba, Japan).J. Gen. Appl. Microbiol., 56, 169 173 (2010) Key Words-Candida rishirensis sp. nov.; new yeast from Rishiri Island; novel methylotrophic yeast

Ogataea phyllophila sp. nov., Candida chumphonensis sp. nov. and Candida mattranensis sp. nov., three methylotrophic yeast species from phylloplane in Thailand

“…;Nakase et al (2010) andPeter et al (2010).On the basis of the evidence of molecular and other taxonomic criteria here we propose three novel species, O. phyllophila sp. nov. (MycoBank no.…”