An orange-coloured, non-spore-forming, motile and coccus-shaped actinobacterium, designated YIM 75677(T), was isolated from a soil sample collected from a dry-hot river valley in Dongchuan county, Yunnan Province, south-west China and its taxonomic position was investigated. Growth of strain YIM 75677(T) occurred at 12-55 °C, pH 6.0-9.0 and NaCl tolerance up to 2 % (w/v). Cells adhered to agar media and were agglutinated tightly together. The peptidoglycan contained meso-diaminopimelic acid, alanine and glutamic acid. The whole-cell hydrolysates mainly contained glucose, galactose, mannose and ribose. The predominant menaquinone was MK-9 (H(2)) and the major fatty acids were anteiso-C(15:0) and iso-C(15:0). Mycolic acids were not present. The DNA G+C content of strain YIM 75677(T) was 74.8 mol%. Phylogenetic analyses based on 16S rRNA gene sequence comparisons clearly revealed that strain YIM 75677(T) represents a novel member of the genus Kineococcus and is closely related to Kineococcus xinjiangensis S2-20(T) (level of similarity, 98.6 %). Meanwhile, the result of DNA-DNA hybridization between strain YIM 75677(T) and K. xinjiangensis S2-20(T) demonstrated that this isolate represented a different genomic species in the genus Kineococcus. On the basis of phylogenetic, phenotypic and chemotaxonomic characteristics, strain YIM 75677(T) represents a novel species of the genus Kineococcus, for which the name Kineococcus glutineturens sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is YIM 75677(T) (=CCTCC AA 209075(T) = JCM 18126(T)).