The resulting 16S rRNA gene sequence was compared with those available in GenBank using the BLAST program (http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi) to determine approximate phylogenetic affiliations. Sequences of closely related organisms were aligned using CLUSTAL X (Thompson et al., 1997). Sequence similarity values were computed using the EzTaxon server
(http://www.eztaxon.org/; Chun et al., 2007).