Forest tree species are increasingly subject to severe mortalities from exotic pests, diseases, and invasive organisms, accelerated by climate change. Forest health issues are threatening multiple species and ecosystem sustainability globally. While sources of resistance may be available in related species, or among surviving trees, introgression of resistance genes into threatened tree species in reasonable time frames requires genome-wide breeding tools. Asian species of chestnut (Castanea spp.) are being employed as donors of disease resistance genes to restore native chestnut species in North America and Europe. To aid in the restoration of threatened chestnut species, we present the assembly of…
Foodborne infections caused by lung flukes of the genus Paragonimus are a significant and widespread public health problem in tropical areas. Approximately 50 Paragonimus species have been reported to infect animals and humans, but Paragonimus westermani is responsible for the bulk of human disease. Despite their medical and economic importance, no genome sequence for any Paragonimus species is available.We sequenced and assembled the genome of P. westermani, which is among the largest of the known pathogen genomes with an estimated size of 1.1 Gb. A 922.8 Mb genome assembly was generated from Illumina and Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) sequence data, covering 84% of…
The Gram-negative bacterium Kerstersia gyiorum, a potential etiological agent of clinical infections, was isolated from several human patients presenting clinical symptoms. Its significance as a possible pathogen has been previously overlooked as no disease has thus far been definitively associated with this bacterium. To better understand how the organism contributes to the infectious disease, we determined the complete genomic sequence of K. gyiorum SWMUKG01, the first clinical isolate from southwest China.The genomic data obtained displayed a single circular chromosome of 3, 945, 801 base pairs in length, which contains 3, 441 protein-coding genes, 55 tRNA genes and 9 rRNA genes.…
Hemiptelea davidii (Hance) Planch is a potential valuable forest tree in arid sandy environments. Here, the complete mitochondrial genome of H. davidii was assembled using a combination of the PacBio Sequel data and the Illumina Hiseq data. The mitochondrial genome is 460,941bp in length, including 37 protein-coding genes, 19 tRNA genes, and three rRNA genes. The GC content of the whole mito- chondrial genome is 44.84%. Phylogenetic analyses indicated that H. davidii is close with Cannabis and Morus species.
Arogyapacha, the local name of Trichopus zeylanicus, is a rare, indigenous medicinal plant of India. This plant is famous for its traditional use as an instant energy stimulant. So far, no genomic resource is available for this important plant and hence its metabolic pathways are poorly understood. Here, we report on a high-quality draft assembly of approximately 713.4 Mb genome of T. zeylanicus, first draft genome from the genus Trichopus The assembly was generated in a hybrid approach using Illumina short-reads and Pacbio longer-reads. The total assembly comprised of 22601 scaffolds with an N50 value of 433.3 Kb. We predicted…
We report the first whole genome sequence (WGS) assembly and annotation of a dwarf coconut variety, ‘Catigan Green Dwarf’ (CATD). The genome sequence was generated using the PacBio SMRT sequencing platform at 15X coverage of the expected genome size of 2.15 Gbp, which was corrected with assembled 50X Illumina paired-end MiSeq reads of the same genome. The draft genome was improved through Chicago sequencing to generate a scaffold assembly that results in a total genome size of 2.1 Gbp consisting of 7,998 scaffolds with N50 of 570,487 bp. The final assembly covers around 97.6% of the estimated genome size of…
Although microorganisms are known to dominate Earth’s biospheres and drive biogeochemical cycling, little is known about the geographic distributions of microbial populations or the environmental factors that pattern those distributions. We used a global-level hierarchical sampling scheme to comprehensively characterize the evolutionary relationships and distributional limitations of the nitrogen-fixing bacterial symbionts of the crop chickpea, generating 1,027 draft whole-genome sequences at the level of bacterial populations, including 14 high-quality PacBio genomes from a phylogenetically representative subset. We find that diverse Mesorhizobium taxa perform symbiosis with chickpea and have largely overlapping global distributions. However, sampled locations cluster based on the phylogenetic…
Triplophysa is an endemic fish genus of the Tibetan Plateau in China. Triplophysa tibetana, which lives at a recorded altitude of ~4,000 m and plays an important role in the highland aquatic ecosystem, serves as an excellent model for investigating high-altitude environmental adaptation. However, evolutionary and conservation studies of T. tibetana have been limited by scarce genomic resources for the genus Triplophysa. In the present study, we applied PacBio sequencing and the Hi-C technique to assemble the T. tibetana genome. A 652-Mb genome with 1,325 contigs with an N50 length of 3.1 Mb was obtained. The 1,137 contigs were further assembled into 25 chromosomes,…
Escherichia coli O157:H7 (O157) has been linked to numerous foodborne disease outbreaks. The ability to rapidly sequence and analyze genomes is important for understanding epidemiology, virulence, survival, and evolution of outbreak strains. In the current study, we performed comparative genomics to determine structural and functional features of the genome of a foodborne O157 isolate NADC 6564 and infer its evolutionary relationship to other O157 strains.The chromosome of NADC 6564 contained 5466?kb compared to reference strains Sakai (5498?kb) and EDL933 (5547?kb) and shared 41 of its 43 Linear Conserved Blocks (LCB) with the reference strains. However, 18 of 41 LCB had…
Vertebrate genomes contain a record of retroviruses that invaded the germlines of ancestral hosts and are passed to offspring as endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). ERVs can impact host function since they contain the necessary sequences for expression within the host. Dogs are an important system for the study of disease and evolution, yet no substantiated reports of infectious retroviruses in dogs exist. Here, we utilized Illumina whole genome sequence data to assess the origin and evolution of a recently active gammaretroviral lineage in domestic and wild canids.We identified numerous recently integrated loci of a canid-specific ERV-Fc sublineage within Canis, including 58…