Strain Gsoil 259(T), a beta-glucosidase-producing bacterium, was isolated from a soil sample from a ginseng field in the Republic of Korea and characterized in order to determine its taxonomic position. Cells were Gram-positive, heterotrophic, strictly aerobic, non-motile short rods. 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis revealed that strain Gsoil 259(T) belonged to the genus Microbacterium and was closely related to Microbacterium arborescens IFO 3750(T) (98.5 %) and Microbacterium imperiale IFO 12610(T) (97.9 %). However, it has low values for DNA-DNA relatedness with the above strains (20.7 and 17.5 %, respectively). Strain Gsoil 259(T) possessed chemotaxonomic markers that were consistent with classification in the genus Microbacterium, i.e. MK-11 and MK-12 were the major menaquinones and anteiso-C(17 : 0), anteiso-C(15 : 0) and iso-C(16 : 0) were the predominant cellular fatty acids. The DNA G+C content was 69.4 mol%. The cell-wall sugar was rhamnose and the diamino acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan was ornithine. On the basis of data from this polyphasic study, strain Gsoil 259(T) represents a novel species of the genus Microbacterium, for which the name Microbacterium ginsengisoli sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is Gsoil 259(T) (=KCTC 19189(T) =DSM 18659(T)).