Report of 22 unrecorded bacterial species in Korea belonging to phylum Bacteroidetes, discovered during surveys in 2018

The phylum Bacteroidetes was first proposed by Krieg et al. (2012) to accommodate phenotypically diverse groups of Gram negative rods that do not form endospores, and currently includes 6 classes, 6 orders, 33 families and 380 genera as of August 2019 (Euzéby, 2019). Bacteroidetes encompasses aerobic and anaerobic heterotrophs, hydrogen utilizing chemolithotrophs and methylotrophs, and some members are capable of nitrogen fixation. Their habitats are also diverse, including terrestrial and aquatic environments, environments with extreme physicochemical conditions, and animal and plant hosts. There have been reports of unrecorded species of this phylum in Korea, and recent studies indicate that members of the genera Chryseobacterium, Flavobacterium, Mucilaginibacter, and Pedobacter have been recovered as main taxa (Cho et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2018; Maeng et al., 2018). In a series of extensive surveys on the prokaryotic diversity in Korea in the year 2018, novel strains belonging to the phylum Bacteroidetes were isolated from various environmental sources, and their taxonomic properties were analyzed. As a result, a total of 22 unrecorded species of Bacteroidetes were identified, and their taxonomic properties are presented. Journal of Species Research 9(1):26-34, 2020