Skip to main content
Microbiology Resource Announcements logoLink to Microbiology Resource Announcements
. 2026 Apr 21;15(6):e00833-25. doi: 10.1128/mra.00833-25

Complete genome sequences of four Ochrobactrum pituitosum strains and three Pseudochrobactrum saccharolyticum strains isolated from Caenorhabditis elegans gut microbiomes

Sandhya Lakshmi Narayanan 1, Carsten Fortmann-Grote 1,✉, Paul B Rainey 1,2
Editor: Zhenjiang Zech Xu3
PMCID: PMC13248721  PMID: 42012414

ABSTRACT

We report complete genomes of four strains of Ochrobactrum pituitosum and three strains of Pseudochrobactrum saccharolyticum isolated from gut microbiomes of Caenorhabditis elegans colonized with microbial communities extracted from garden compost. Genomes were assembled from Oxford Nanopore long read data and polished with Illumina short read data.

KEYWORDS: Ochrobactrum, Pseudochrobactrum, assembly, annotation, environmental sample, C. elegans, compost

ANNOUNCEMENT

We announce closed genome assemblies and annotations of four Ochrobactrum pituitosum strains (NCBI: txid571256) and three Pseudochrobactrum saccharolyticum strains (NCBI: txid354352). Both taxa are part of the Family Brucellaceae (NCBI: txid118882).

Strains were isolated from the gut microbiome of Caenorhabditis elegans strain N2 (Caenorhabditis Genomic Center) (1). Three microbial communities were extracted from garden compost, frozen at −80°C, re-thawed, and acclimatized on plates (M9 buffer, 1.5% agar) containing 4 cm2 cellulose paper at 20°C. After 2 weeks, community-degraded paper was suspended in buffer, and 100 µL of the slurry was transferred to an identical piece of paper on fresh agar. Approximately 100 nematodes were added to the paper, with nematodes feeding leading to the colonization of the gut by bacteria.

After three 2-week transfers, nematodes were collected from the paper, surface-sterilized, and pulverized for 5 min using a tissue lyser (TissueLyser II, Qiagen) for microbiome extraction. Extracted samples were serially diluted and plated on TSA agar plates and incubated at 30°C for 24–48 h. Single colonies were purified by re-streaking colonies on TSA plates and stored in 70% glycerol saline aliquots at −80°C. Samples were thawed and re-grown (overnight) in shaking 6 mL LB broth at 28°C. Genomic DNA was extracted following the method described in a previous study (2) and purified using the Genomic DNA Clean & Concentrate kit–10 (Zymo Research). DNA was quantified using the Invitrogen Qubit dsDNA Broad Range (BR) assay kit.

Long-read sequencing (Oxford Nanopore Technology) was performed by Eurofins (Germany). Short-read sequencing was performed on a NextSeq500 platform (MPI for Evolutionary Biology) at 150 bp read length, paired-end sequencing, and 60-fold coverage. In-house library preparation used a Tn5 transposase enzyme library (3). Short-read raw data were quality-controlled using MultiQC v1.11 (4). Here, and in the following, default parameters were applied unless otherwise noted.

Raw nanopore sequencing (5) was filtered for low quality and short reads using Filtlong v0.2.1 (6) before being assembled using Flye v2.9.3 (7); parameters were optimized for bacterial genomes (7). Contigs were polished using Medaka v1.8 (8). Assembled genomes were annotated using Bakta v.1.8.2 (9). Quality of the assembled genomes was assessed using QUAST v5.2 (10), CheckM2 v1.0.1 (11), and Mash v2.3 (12). As a final QC step, sequence-cleaned reads were mapped onto the assembly using minimap2 v2.24 (13). Finally, long-read assemblies were polished with our Illumina short reads using nextpolish v1.4.1 (14) and postprocessed with samtools v1.2.1 (15).

Assembled genomes were circularized with DNApler (16) (default parameters) such that the start site coincides with the dnaA gene start codon. Average genome coverage was 84.0× with a GC content of 57.8%.

Genera were identified by 16S metabarcode sequencing (using primers 341F (CCTACGGGNGGCWGCAG) and 805R (GACTACHVGGGTATCTAATCC) to amplify the hypervariable V3-V4 region) and analyzed using phylos v1.52.0 (17). Isolates were inferred from a gyrA neighbor-joining phylogeny (Tamura-Nei distance) using ClustalΩ v1.2.4 (1, 18).

Strains taxonomy was determined by ANI analysis (19, 20), including type strains Ochrobactrum pituitosum CCUG:50899 and Pseudochrobactrum saccharolyticum DSM:25620, using FastANI v0.1.3 (21) (Fig. 1). All samples,raw reads, assemblies, and annotations are deposited on the ENA, see Table 1.

Fig 1.

Clustered heatmap of ANI similarity values between bacterial strains. Two distinct clusters emerge with values ranging from 0.77 to 0.79 in yellow and 0.96 to 0.99 in blue, revealing genomic relationships between Pseudochrobactrum and Ochrobactrum strains.

Clustered heatmap of ANI similarity values for seven announced strains and type strains P. saccharolyticum DSM25260 and O. pituitosum CCUG50899.

TABLE 1.

Summary table

Sample Property Value
SAMEA118333800 Organism O. pituitosum
Taxon ID 71256
Isolate/strain MPB25535
Short read exp ERX14406277
Short read run ERR15002230
Short read count 1,727,681
Short read GC% 53.3
Short read mean length (Rl, R2) 150,150
Long read exp ERX14512245
Long read run ERR15107547
Long read count 87,517
Long read mean length 6113
Long read GC% 55.0
Assembly GCA_965577835
Total size 4,963,799
Contigs 3
GC% 53.4
N50 13,839,640
ANI (O. pituitosum CCUG50899) 98.06
Annotation ERZ26904280
Annotated CDSs 4662
SAMEA118333801 Organism O. pituitosum
Taxon ID 71256
Isolate/Strain MPB25451
Short read exp ERX14406278
Short read run ERR15002231
Short read count 1,790,809
Short read mean length (R1, R2) 150,150
Short read GC% 53.5
Long read exp ERX14512247
Long read run ERR15107549
Long read count 50,100
Long read mean length 4595
Long read GC% 51.8
Assembly GCA_965579405
Total size 5,097,185
Contigs 3
GC% 53.5
N50 6,950,440
ANI (O. pituitosum CCUG50899) 98.27
Annotation ERZ26904286
Annotated CDSs 4825
SAMEA118333802 Organism O. pituitosum
Taxon ID 71256
Isolate/Strain MPB25440
Short read exp ERX14406279
Short read run ERR15002232
Short read count 1,595,120
Short read mean length (Rl, R2) 150,150
Short read GC% 53.5
Long read exp ERX14512249
Long read run ERR15107551
Long read count 44,497
Long read mean length 6424
Long read GC% 53.5
Assembly GCA_965579335
Total size 4,550,329
Contigs 4
GC% 53.5
N50 7959060
ANI (O. pituitosum CCUG50899) 98.40
Annotation ERZ26904287
Annotated CDSs 4285
SAMEA118333803 Organism O. pituitosum
Taxon ID 71256
Isolate/Strain MPB25478
Short read exp ERX14512100
Short read run ERR15107402
Short read count 1,630,005
Short read mean length (R1, R2) 150,150
Short read GC% 53.3
Long read exp ERX14512251
Long read run ERR15107553
Long read count 74,814
Long read mean length 3862
Long read GC% 53.3
Assembly GCA_965579345
Total size 4,852,914
Contigs 4
GC% 53.3
N50 39,450,584
ANI (O. pituitosum CCUG50899) 98.52
Annotation ERZ26904288
Annotated CDSs 4552
SAMEA118333804 Organism P. saccharolyticum
Taxon ID 54352
Isolate/Strain MPB25528
Short read exp ERX14406336
Short read run ERR15002289
Short read count 440,692
Short read mean length (Rl, R2) 150,150
Short read GC% 51.5
Long read exp ERX14512252
Long read run ERR15107554
Long read count 48,318
Long read mean length 5292
Long read GC% 56.3
Assembly GCA_965579315
Total size 3,733,418
Contigs 3
GC% 51.5
N50 12184706
ANI (P. saccharolyticum DSM25260) 96.29
Annotation ERZ26904290
Annotated CDSs 3348
SAMEA118333805 Organism P. saccharolyticum
Taxon ID 54352
Isolate/Strain MPB25488
Short read exp ERX14406304
Short read run ERR15002257
Short read count 419,074
Short read mean length (Rl, R2) 150,150
Short read GC% 51.4
Long read exp ERX14512253
Long read run ERR15107555
Long read count 33,095
Long read mean length 6,247
Long read GC% 55.1
Assembly GCA_965579355
Total size 3,753,639
Contigs 2
GC% 51.5
N50 10,475,352
ANI (P. saccharolyticum DSM25260) 96.35
Annotation ERZ26904289
Annotated CDSs 3365
SAMEA118333806 Organism P. saccharolyticum
Taxon ID 54352
Isolate/Strain MPB25441
Short read exp ERX14406305
Short read run ERR15002258
Short read count 478,435
Short read mean length (R1, R2) 150,150
Short read GC% 51.6
Long read exp ERX14512255
Long read run ERR15107557
Long read count 149,774
Long read mean length 5140
Long read GC% 54.7
Assembly GCA_965579305
Total size 3,839,354
Contigs 2
GC% 51.6
N50 5,324,660
ANI (P. saccharolyticum CCUG33852) 96.20
Annotation ERZ26904291
Annotated CDSs 3473

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the Max Planck Society for generous core support and acknowledge funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Collaborative Research Center 1182 "Origin and Function of Metaorganisms" (grant no. SFB1182). We are also grateful to Pauline Buffard for short read sequencing data, and Ishan Bhatt for contributions to bioinformatic processing.

Contributor Information

Carsten Fortmann-Grote, Email: grotec@evolbio.mpg.de.

Zhenjiang Zech Xu, Nanchang University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China.

DATA AVAILABILITY

Samples and data were submitted to the ENA BioProject PRJEB87311, see Table 1 for accessions. Code for gyrA and ANI analysis is deposited in https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:067262a26b6b51b384fe7955736135216cbbca5d.

REFERENCES

  • 1. Buffard P. 2023. A simple path to complexity: horizontal gene transfer in microbial communities. PhD [Google Scholar]
  • 2. Theodosiou L, Farr AD, Rainey PB. 2023. Barcoding populations of Pseudomonas fluorescens SBW25. J Mol Evol 91:254–262. doi: 10.1007/s00239-023-10103-6 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 3. Picelli S, Björklund AK, Reinius B, Sagasser S, Winberg G, Sandberg R. 2014. Tn5 transposase and tagmentation procedures for massively scaled sequencing projects. Genome Res 24:2033–2040. doi: 10.1101/gr.177881.114 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 4. Ewels P, Magnusson M, Lundin S, Käller M. 2016. MultiQC: summarize analysis results for multiple tools and samples in a single report. Bioinformatics 32:3047–3048. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw354 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 5. Fortmann-Grote C. 2025. Raw and processed ont long read sequencing data for "complete genome sequences of four Ochrobactrum pituitosum strains and three Pseudochrobactrum saccharolyticum strains isolated from Caenorhabditis elegans gut microbiomes. Available from: 10.5281/ZENODO.17973826 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed]
  • 6. R. Wick . 2022. Rrwick/filtlong. https://github.com/rrwick/Filtlong.
  • 7. Kolmogorov M, Yuan J, Lin Y, Pevzner PA. 2019. Assembly of long, error-prone reads using repeat graphs. Nat Biotechnol 37:540–546. doi: 10.1038/s41587-019-0072-8 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 8. Oxford Nanopore technologies Ltd. nanoporetech/medaka. 2026. Available from: https://github.com/nanoporetech/medaka
  • 9. Schwengers O, Jelonek L, Dieckmann MA, Beyvers S, Blom J, Goesmann A. 2021. Bakta: rapid and standardized annotation of bacterial genomes via alignment-free sequence identification: find out more about bakta, the motivation, challenges and applications, here. Microb Genom 7:11. doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000685 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 10. Gurevich A, Saveliev V, Vyahhi N, Tesler G. 2013. QUAST: quality assessment tool for genome assemblies. Bioinformatics 29:1072–1075. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btt086 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 11. Chklovski A, Parks DH, Woodcroft BJ, Tyson GW. 2023. CheckM2: a rapid, scalable and accurate tool for assessing microbial genome quality using machine learning. Nat Methods 20:1203–1212. doi: 10.1038/s41592-023-01940-w [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 12. Ondov BD, Treangen TJ, Melsted P, Mallonee AB, Bergman NH, Koren S, Phillippy AM. 2016. Mash: fast genome and metagenome distance estimation using MinHash. Genome Biol 17:132. doi: 10.1186/s13059-016-0997-x [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 13. Li H. 2018. Minimap2: pairwise alignment for nucleotide sequences. Bioinformatics 34:3094–3100. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty191 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 14. Hu J, Fan J, Sun Z, Liu S. 2020. NextPolish: a fast and efficient genome polishing tool for long-read assembly. Bioinformatics 36:2253–2255. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz891 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 15. Bonfield JK, Marshall J, Danecek P, Li H, Ohan V, Whitwham A, Keane T, Davies RM. 2021. HTSlib: C library for reading/writing high-throughput sequencing data. Gigascience 10:giab007. doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giab007 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 16. Bouras G, Grigson SR, Papudeshi B, Mallawaarachchi V, Roach MJ. 2024. Dnaapler: a tool to reorient circular microbial genomes. JOSS 9:5968. doi: 10.21105/joss.05968 [DOI] [Google Scholar]
  • 17. McMurdie PJ, Holmes S. 2013. Phyloseq: an R package for reproducible interactive analysis and graphics of microbiome census data. PLoS One 8:e61217. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0061217 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 18. Sievers F, Wilm A, Dineen D, Gibson TJ, Karplus K, Li W, Lopez R, McWilliam H, Remmert M, Söding J, Thompson JD, Higgins DG. 2011. Fast, scalable generation of high-quality protein multiple sequence alignments using clustal Omega. Mol Syst Biol 7:539. doi: 10.1038/msb.2011.75 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 19. Meier-Kolthoff JP, Göker M. 2019. TYGS is an automated high-throughput platform for state-of-the-art genome-based taxonomy. Nat Commun 10:2182. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-10210-3 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 20. Rodriguez-R LM, Conrad RE, Viver T, Feistel DJ, Lindner BG, Venter SN, Orellana LH, Amann R, Rossello-Mora R, Konstantinidis KT. 2024. An ANI gap within bacterial species that advances the definitions of intra-species units. mBio 15:e0269623. doi: 10.1128/mbio.02696-23 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 21. Jain C, Rodriguez-R LM, Phillippy AM, Konstantinidis KT, Aluru S. 2018. High throughput ANI analysis of 90K prokaryotic genomes reveals clear species boundaries. Nat Commun 9:5114. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-07641-9 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Data Availability Statement

Samples and data were submitted to the ENA BioProject PRJEB87311, see Table 1 for accessions. Code for gyrA and ANI analysis is deposited in https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:067262a26b6b51b384fe7955736135216cbbca5d.


Articles from Microbiology Resource Announcements are provided here courtesy of American Society for Microbiology (ASM)

RESOURCES