A report of 42 unrecorded bacterial species belonging to the Alphaproteobacteria in Korea

As a subset study to discover indigenous prokaryotic species in Korea, a total of 42 bacterial strains assigned to the class Alphaproteobacteria were isolated from diverse environmental habitats including plant roots, ginseng soil, forest soil, marsh, mud flat, freshwater, and seawater. From the high 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity (>99.1%) and formation of a robust phylogenetic clade with the closest species, it was determined that each strain belonged to each independent and predefined bacterial species. There is no official report that these 42 species have been described in Korea; therefore 4 species of 1 genera in the order Caulobacterales, 18 species of 10 genera in the order Rhizobiales, 7 species of 5 genera in the order Sphingomonadales and 13 species of 11 genera in the order Rhodobacterales within the Alphaproteobacteria are reported for alphaproteobacterial species found in Korea. Gram reaction, colony and cell morphology, basic biochemical characteristics, isolation source, and strain IDs are also described in the species description section.