J. Gen. Appl. Microbiol., 50, 249–254 (2004)

For several years, our laboratory has isolated numerous bacterial strains from soils and wastewater contaminated with toxic compounds in order to find useful bacteria that can degrade phenolic compounds such as phenol, chlorophenol, and nitrophenol. By enrichment, many phenolic compound-degrading bacteria have been isolated (Bae et al., 1996a, b; Baek et al., 2001; Yoon et al., 1999, 2000). Furthermore, some bacteria that could not degrade phenolic compounds, but instead were resistant to such compounds have been isolated simultaneously. Identification of the strain Chj404, which was resistant to 1 mM phenol and 4-chlorophenol concentrations for 1 week culturing, showed that Chj404 was phylogenetically distant from other bacteria isolated thus far, and as such we have decided to classify this bacterium. A polyphasic approach, including phenotypic, chemotaxonomic and molecular methods, was used to determine the taxonomic position of this isolated strain. In this study, we report the morphological, biochemical, and phylogenetic characteristics of the novel strain Chj404.