Sodalis praecaptivus subsp. spalangiae subsp. nov., a nascent bacterial endosymbiont isolated from the parasitoid wasp, Spalangia cameroni

An endosymbiotic bacterium of the genus , designated as strain HZ , was cultured from the parasitoid wasp , which develops on the pupae of various host flies. The bacterium was detected in developed on houseflies, , in a poultry facility in Hazon, northern Israel. After culturing, this bacterium displayed no surface motility on Luria-Bertani agar and was rod-shaped and irregular in size, ~10-30 nm in diameter and 5-20 µm in length. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that strain HZ is closely related to strain HS , a free-living species of the genus that includes many insect endosymbionts. Although these bacteria maintain >98% sequence identity in shared genes, genomic characterization revealed that strain HZ has undergone substantial reductive evolution, such that it lacks many gene functions that are maintained in strain HS . Based on the results of phylogenetic, genomic and chemotaxonomic analyses, we propose that this endosymbiont should be classified in a new subspecies as subsp. s subsp. nov. The type strain for this new subspecies is HZ (=ATCC TSD-398 =NCIMB 15482 ). The subspecies subsp. strain HS is created automatically with the type strain ATCC BAA-2554 (=DSMZ 27494 ).