“Mycobacterium mephinesia”, a Mycobacterium terrae complex species of clinical interest isolated in French Polynesia

A 59-year-old tobacco smoker male with chronic bronchitis living in Taravao, French Polynesia, Pacific, presented with a two-year growing nodule in the middle lobe of the right lung. A guided bronchoalveolar lavage inoculated onto Löwenstein-Jensen medium yielded colonies of a rapidly-growing non-chromogenic mycobacterium designed as isolate P7213. The isolate could not be identified using routine matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight-mass spectrometry and phenotypic and probe-hybridization techniques and yielded 100% and 97% sequence similarity with the respective 16S rRNA and rpoB gene sequences of Mycobacterium virginiense in the Mycobacterium terrae complex. Electron microscopy showed a 1.15 µm long and 0.38 µm large bacillus which was in vitro susceptible to rifampicin, rifabutin, ethambutol, isoniazid, doxycycline and kanamycin. Its 4,511,948-bp draft genome exhibited a 67.6% G + C content with 4,153 coding-protein genes and 87 predicted RNA genes. Genome sequence-derived DNA-DNA hybridization, OrthoANI and pangenome analysis confirmed isolate P7213 was representative of a new species in the M. terrae complex. We named this species “Mycobacterium mephinesia”.