ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 20 January 2017 doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.00022 Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, Bacillus velezensis, and Bacillus siamensis Form an “Operational Group B. amyloliquefaciens” within the B. subtilis Species Complex Ben Fan 1, Jochen Blom 2, Hans-Peter Klenk 3 and Rainer Borriss 4, 5* 1 Co-Innovation Center for Sustainable Forestry in Southern China, College of Forestry, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China, 2 Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Giessen, Germany, 3 School of Biology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 4 Fachgebiet Phytomedizin, Institut für Agrar- und Gartenbauwissenschaften, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 5 Nord Reet UG, Greifswald, Germany Edited by: Rakesh Sharma, The plant growth promoting model bacterium FZB42T was proposed as the type strain Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR), India of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens subsp. plantarum (Borriss et al., 2011), but has been Reviewed by: recently recognized as being synonymous to Bacillus velezensis due to phylogenomic Prabhu B. Patil, analysis (Dunlap C. et al., 2016). However, until now, majority of publications consider Institute of Microbial Technology plant-associated close relatives of FZB42 still as “B. amyloliquefaciens.” Here, we (CSIR), India Bo Liu, reinvestigated the taxonomic status of FZB42 and related strains in its context to Fujian Academy of Agaricultural the free-living soil bacterium DSM7T, the type strain of B. amyloliquefaciens. We Sciences, China identified 66 bacterial genomes from the NCBI data bank with high similarity to DSM7T. *Correspondence: Rainer Borriss Dendrograms based on complete rpoB nucleotide sequences and on core genome
[email protected] sequences, respectively, clustered into a clade consisting of three tightly linked branches: (1) B.