Nocardia salmonicida nom. rev., a fish pathogen

An almost complete gene sequence of 16S rDNA of 'Nocardia salmonicida' stra in JCM 4826(T) was determined following cloning and sequencing of the ampli fied gene. The sequence was aligned with those available for nocardiae and phylogenetic trees inferred using four tree-making algorithms. The organism and the type strain of Nocardia asteroides consistently formed a monophyle tic clade with a distant sequence similarity of 97 %. However, previous DNA relatedness experiments showed that strain JCM 4826(T) and Nocardia astero ides ATCC 19247(T) belong to different genomic species. The organism was al so distinguished from representatives of all validly described species of N ocardia using a combination of phenotypic features. The polyphasic evidence showed that the strain merits recognition as a new species of the genus No cardia. The name proposed for the new species is Nocardia salmonicida nom. rev.