A novel actinomycete, strain 04-5195 T , that produces amicoumacin B, which targets bone morphogenetic protein-2, was isolated from a soil sample collected in Jinan, Shandong Province, China. Strain 04-5195 T had morphological, biochemical, physiological and chemotaxonomic properties that were consistent with its classification in the genus Nocardia and it formed a phyletic line in the Nocardia 16S rRNA gene tree. It was evident from the phylogenetic data that strain 04-5195 T was most closely associated with Nocardia speluncae N2-11 T . However, the two organisms were distinguishable from one another using DNA-DNA relatedness and phenotypic data. The isolate was readily differentiated from other related Nocardia strains by a set of phenotypic properties and by its phylogenetic position. Therefore, it is proposed that the isolate represents a novel species in the genus Nocardia, Nocardia jinanensis sp. nov.; the type strain is 04-5195 T (5CGMCC 4.3508 T 5DSM 45048 T ).The genus Nocardia was proposed by Trevisan (1889) with Nocardia farcinica as the original type species (the type species is now Nocardia asteroides). The genus belongs to the mycolic-acid-containing group of actinomycetes, members of which form extensively branched mycelia and substrate hyphae that fragment into rod-shaped, nonmotile elements (Goodfellow & Lechevalier, 1989). The application of chemotaxonomic, numerical phenetic and molecular systematic methods has led to improved classification of members of the genus Nocardia (Goodfellow, 1998;Goodfellow et al., 1999). At the time of writing, the genus contained 71 species with validly published names. Many Nocardia species have been shown to be agents of human disease, such as N. asteroides, N. farcinica and Nocardia nova (Schaal & Lee, 1992;Wallace et al., 1991), although it has also been shown that some species produce secondary metabolites of potential industrial value Kinoshita et al., 2001), e.g. Nocardia uniformis, which can produce nocardicin. In the course of screening micro-organisms for new anti-osteoporosis agents targeting bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2), an active compound (5195A) with the potential to increase expression of the BMP-2 gene was found in fermentation broth of a nocardioform actinomycete, strain 04-5195 T , that had been isolated from soil. The compound 5195A was identified as amicoumacin B (Yang et al., 2007), which has been reported previously to be produced by Bacillus pumilus (Itoh et al., 1982). A polyphasic taxonomic investigation based on genotypic and phenotypic characteristics revealed that isolate T represents a novel species of the genus Nocardia.
Strain 04-5195T was isolated on a modified Sauton's agar plate (Mordarska et al., 1972) that had been incubated at 28 u C for 2 weeks following inoculation with a suspension of a soil sample collected from Jinan, Shandong Province, China. The isolate was maintained on yeast extract-malt extract agar (ISP 2;Shirling & Gottlieb, 1966) slopes at 4 u C and as glycerol suspensions (20 %, v/v) at 220 u C. All...