ABSTRACT
Here, we report the draft genome sequences of three laboratory variants of Bacillus anthracis Sterne and their double (Δlef Δcya) and triple (Δpag Δlef Δcya) toxin gene deletion derivatives.
GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT
The pathogenicity of Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, has been attributed to the presence of two plasmids in its genome, pXO1, which encodes the anthrax toxin genes, and pXO2, which encodes the capsular genes (1). Strains that lack pXO2 (e.g., Sterne) are exempt from select agent regulations and have been used as vaccines (2). Sterne is also the workhorse of laboratory research, and different laboratories have used and propagated Sterne strains over many years; consequently, these strains appear to have accumulated laboratory-specific adaptations. Here, we report the whole-genome draft sequences of three Sterne strains and four toxin gene deletion derivatives.
Libraries were prepared using the Illumina Nextera XT kit and sequenced on an Illumina NextSeq 500 desktop sequencer (V2 mid-output 2 × 151 bp). Adapter sequences were removed with Cutadapt (3) and assembled using SPAdes v3.9 (4). The genome was annotated with the NCBI Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline v4.2 (5), and reference mapping was done with Bowtie2 v2.0.6 (6).
Accession number(s).
Accession numbers and sequence statistics of the seven genomes are listed in Table 1.
TABLE 1 .
Genome sequence details of B. anthracis Sterne variants and their derivatives
| Strain | Description | GenBank accession no. | Assembly size (bp) | No. of contigs | No. of CDSsa | Coverage (×) |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chrb | pXO1c | ||||||
| BA500 | Sterne 34F2_FDA | NRIZ00000000 | 5,358,909 | 44 | 5,882 | 176 | 1,057 |
| BAP482 | BA500 (Δlef Δcya) | NRJA00000000 | 5,357,360 | 53 | 5,889 | 183 | 1,014 |
| BAP417 | BA500 (Δpag Δlef Δcya) | NRJB00000000 | 5,354,685 | 60 | 5,888 | 166 | 953 |
| BA663 | Sterne 7702 | NRIW00000000 | 5,362,963 | 60 | 5,897 | 195 | 1,287 |
| BA721 | BA663 (Δlef Δcya) | NRIX00000000 | 5,347,571 | 50 | 5,882 | 200 | 1,268 |
| BA781 | BA663 (Δpag Δlef Δcya) | NRIY00000000 | 5,345,676 | 50 | 5,877 | 202 | 1,244 |
| 34F2_Sterne | USAMRIID | NRIV00000000 | 5,364,310 | 69 | 5,905 | 147 | 512 |
Footnotes
Citation Staab A, Plaut RD, Pratt C, Lovett SP, Wiley MR, Biggs TD, Bernhards RC, Beck LC, Palacios GF, Stibitz S, Jones KL, Goodwin BG, Smith MA, Sozhamannan S. 2017. Whole-genome sequences of variants of Bacillus anthracis Sterne and their toxin gene deletion mutants. Genome Announc 5:e01231-17. https://doi.org/10.1128/genomeA.01231-17.
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