Alcaligenes piechaudii, a New Species from Human Clinical Specimens and the Environment

We propose a new species, Alcaligenes piechaudii; the type strain is strain CIP 60.75 (= Hugh 366-5 = IAM 12591 = LMG 1873). Each of the seven strains placed in this new species was examined for 171 phenotypic characters, including reactions in 68 enzyme tests (API ZYM system). All of the strains displayed similar protein electrophoretic patterns and yielded low deoxyribonucleic acid relatedness values with the type strains of Alcaligenes faecalis, Alcaligenes denitrificans, and Achromobacter xylosoxidans. The results of deoxyribonucleic acid-ribosomal ribonucleic acid hybridization experiments localized Alcaligenes piechaudii on the Alcaligenes denitrificans ribosomal ribonucleic acid branch in the direct vicinity of Alcaligenes denitrificans and Achromobacter xylosoxidans. Alcaligenes piechaudii strains are rod shaped, aerobic, gram negative, nonpigmented, motile by peritrichous flagella, and nonsaccharolytic and reduce nitrate but not nitrite. The guanine-plus-cytosine contents of the deoxyribonucleic acids of the seven strains ranged from 64 to 65 mol%. The strains of the new species were isolated primarily from human clinical specimens, but some strains were also isolated from the environment. The validated but illegitimate name Alcaligenes denitrificans subsp. xylosoxydans (Yabuuchi and Yano 1981) Kersters and De Ley 1984 is corrected with a formal proposal of the proper combinations Alcaligenes xylosoxidans subsp. xylosoxidans (Yabuuchi and Yano 1981) comb. nov. (type strain, strain ATCC 27061) and Alcaligenes xylosoxidans subsp. denitrificans (Rüger and Tan 1983) comb. nov. (type strain, strain ATCC 15173).