A Gram-stain-negative, facultative anaerobic, methylphosphonate-decomposing, motile by a polar flagellum and rod-shaped marine bacterium, designated S4B1T, was isolated from the surface seawater collected from the Yongle Atoll (Xisha Islands, PR China). The pairwise alignment showed the highest sequence similarity of 97.5 and 96.6 % to Vibrio aestuarianus subsp. cardii 12_122_3T3T and Vibrio atypicus HHS02T, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene and the phylogenomic analysis of single-copy genes showed that strain S4B1T belonged to the genus Vibrio and formed a close branch with Vibrio qingdaonensis ZSDZ65T. Growth of strain S4B1T occurred at 4-30 °C (optimum, 28 °C), at pH 6.0-8.0 (optimum, pH 7.0) and in the presence of 2-7 % (w/v) NaCl (optimum, 3 %). The predominant fatty acids (>10 %) were C16 : 0, iso-C16 : 0 and summed feature 3 (C16 : 1 ω7c or/and C16 : 1 ω6c). The DNA G+C content of the assembled genomic sequence was 44.3 mol%. Average nucleotide identity (ANI) values between S4B1T and its reference species were lower than the threshold for species delineation (95-96 %), in which its highest ANI value with V. qingdaonensis ZSDZ65T was 87.0 %. In silico DNA-DNA hybridization further showed that strain S4B1T had less than 70 % similarity to its relatives. On the basis of the polyphasic evidence, strain S4B1T is proposed to represent a novel species of the genus Vibrio, for which the name Vibrio methylphosphonaticus sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is S4B1T (=KCTC 92311T=MCCC 1K06168T).
Keywords: Vibrio methylphosphonaticus sp. nov.; Xisha Islands; methylphosphonate; surface seawater.