Draft Genome Sequence of Alicyclobacillus hesperidum Strain URH17-3-68

Abstract

Alicyclobacillus hesperidum is a thermoacidophilic bacterium. We isolated strain URH17-3-68 from hot spring sludge in Tengchong, Yunnan province, China. Its extracellular products include heat- and acid-stable enzymes which are important for industrial applications. Here we report the draft genome of this strain.

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Alicyclobacillus hesperidum strain URH17-3-68 was initially isolated from hot spring sludge in Tengchong, Yunnan province, China. It is a thermoacidophilic, aerobic, Gram-positive bacterium, and it grows optimally at 50 to 55°C and pH 3.5 to 4. In 2000, Albuquerque et al. reported the isolation of Alicyclobacillus hesperidum from the solfataric soils at Furnas on the Island of São Miguel in the Azores (1), but there has been no further research (including genome sequencing) on this strain.

We have found that extracellular products of URH17-3-68 have thermoacidophilic enzyme activities of amylase, cellulose, etc., rendering it a potential strain for further industrial production. To facilitate understanding of the genome and cloning of important genes, we sequenced strain URH17-3-68 using the Illumina HiSeq 2000. Paired-end sequencing libraries with insert sizes of ∼200 bp and ∼300 bp were constructed using the protocol recommended by Illumina. The sequencing was performed with 2 × 75-bp reads to generate 494.93 Mb of filtered sequences. The genome sequence was assembled using the Velvet de novo assembler (v1.2.03) (8) with a k-mer length of 57. The size of the draft genome is ∼3 Mb, representing ∼165-fold coverage. It contains 78 large contigs (>500 bp); N₅₀ is 128,978 bp, and N₉₀ is 33,233 bp, with a G+C content of 54%. The draft genome annotations predict 71 tRNA sequences, 7 rRNA sequences, and 2,922 protein-coding genes using tRNAscan-SE (5, 7), RNAmmer (4), and Glimmer3.0 (3, 6). Analysis of gene function was carried out by BLAST (2). Many important industrial enzyme genes were identified, such as alpha-amylase, alpha-glucosidase, protease, and phospholipase D. Based on 16S rRNA and protein similarity, Alicyclobacillus hesperidum strain URH17-3-68 is closely related to Alicyclobacillus acidocaldarius subsp. acidocaldarius DSM 446.

In summary, these observations, combined with further comparative genome analysis, may contribute to abundant resources for industrial enzyme production.

Nucleotide sequence accession numbers.

This Whole Genome Shotgun project has been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession number AKZN00000000. The version described in this paper is the first version, AKZN01000000.