A novel actinomycete, designated strain VN05A0561T , was isolated from plant litter collected at Ba Be National Park, Vietnam. The substrate mycelia and spore chains fragmented in a manner similar to nocardioform actinomycetes; the spores had smooth surfaces and were rodshaped. Strain VN05A0561 T had the following chemotaxonomic characteristics: mesodiaminopimelic acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan, arabinose and galactose as characteristic sugars, MK-8(H 4 ) as the major isoprenoid quinone, phosphatidylcholine as the diagnostic phospholipid and iso-C 16 : 0 as the major cellular fatty acid. Strain VN05A0561 T shared low levels of 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity (,97 %) with the type strains of recognized species of the genus Pseudonocardia and could be differentiated from its closest phylogenetic relatives based on phenotypic characteristics. These results suggested that strain VN05A0561 T represents a novel species of the genus Pseudonocardia, for which the name Pseudonocardia babensis sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is VN05A0561 T (5VTCC-A-The genus Pseudonocardia was established as a nocardioform actinomycete by Henssen (1957), and its description has been emended based on both chemotaxonomic and morphological variations (Reichert et al., 1998;Huang et al., 2002;Park et al., 2008). On the basis of the lack of mycolic acids and the presence of cell-wall type IV, the genera Amycolata (Lechevalier et al., 1986) and Pseudoamycolata were also proposed as nocardioform actinomycetes. However, the latter two genera were found to have chemotaxonomic properties similar to those of the genus Pseudonocardia (Kothe et al., 1989;Takeuchi et al., 1992), and were incorporated in the genus Pseudonocardia on the basis of 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis (Warwick et al., 1994;McVeigh et al., 1994). Subsequently, members of the genus Actinobispora (Jiang et al., 1991) were also transferred to the genus Pseudonocardia based on identification with the use of specific PCR primers, and re-analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences and menaquinones of the type species (Huang et al., 2002 Reichert et al., 1998;Gu et al., 2006; Chen et al., 2009).In the present study, a Pseudonocardia-like strain isolated from a plant litter sample collected during the course of a study on the diversity of actinomycetes inhabiting Vietnam (Sakiyama et al., 2009) was studied by using a polyphasic taxonomic approach.Plant litter samples were collected at the Ba Be National Park, Bac Kan, in the mountainous area of northern Vietnam. Samples were dried at room temperature for 5-7 days and subsequently used for isolation. Rehydration and centrifugation methods (Hayakawa et al., 2000) were employed for isolation by using humic acid-vitamin agar (Hayakawa & Nonomura, 1987) containing nalidixic acid (20 mg l
21) and kabicidine (0.75 mg l
21). Strain VN05A0561 T was isolated after incubation for more than 10 days at room temperature.
Strain VN05A0561T was cultured on yeast extract-soluble starch medium (YS medium; per litre distilled water: 2 g yeast extract...