The genus contains the type species Paraburkholderia graminis comb. nov. (Basonym: Burkholderia graminis, Viallard et al., 1998) The species from this genus are gram-negative straight or slightly curved rods with one or more polar flagella. Other morphological and metabolic characteristics are similar to genus Burkholderia. The G+C content for the members of the genus ranges from 61.4 to 65.0%. The species are not associated with humans. The members of this genus generally form a distinct clade in the neighborhood of genus Burkholderia in phylogenetic trees, and they lack the molecular signatures which are specific for Burkholderia. Most of the sequenced members from this genus contain the conserved sequence indels reported in this work in the protein sequences of an unnamed dehydrogenase and a LysR family transcriptional regulator (Table 2).