Draft Genome Sequence of Bacillus thuringiensis Serovar Tolworthi Strain Na205-3, an Isolate Toxic for Helicoverpa armigera.

We report here the complete annotated 6,510,053-bp draft genome sequence of Bacillus thuringiensis serovar tolworthi strain Na205-3, which is toxic for Helicoverpa armigera. This strain potentially contains nine insecticidal toxin genes homologous to cry1Aa12, cry1Ab1, cry1Ab8, cry1Ba1, cry1Af1, cry1Ia10, vip1Bb1, vip2Ba2, and vip3Aa6.

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bacillales: Bacillaceae), one of the best-characterized entomopathogenic bacteria, carries plasmids bearing a variety of genes coding for proteins with valuable insecticidal characteristics (1). These proteins can be classified into distinct protein groups according to their amino acid identities and protein structures: Cry and Cyt proteins (δ-endotoxins) (2); vegetative insecticidal proteins Vip1/Vip2 (binary toxin) (3), Vip3 (4), and Vip4 (http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/Home/Neil_Crickmore/Bt/); Bin-like and Mtx-like proteins (1, 5); the secreted insecticidal proteins Sip (6); accessory proteins P19 and P20 (7); and enhancin-like proteins (8). In this work, we report the draft genome sequence of Bacillus thuringiensis serovar tolworthi strain Na205-3, which is toxic against Helicoverpa armigera (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) (9). Purified total DNA from strain Na205-3 was sequenced at the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) (Shenzhen, China) using high-throughput Illumina sequencing technology. The reads were assembled using SOAPdenovo (version 1.05) and produced 169 contigs totaling 6,510,053 bp, with a maximum scaffold size of 427,627 bp, an N50 length of 161,129 bp, and 34.7% G+C content. Genome annotation was added by the NCBI Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (released in 2013), although it was also analyzed with BLAST (10) using a custom insecticidal toxin database, the RAST server (11), and the BtToxin_scanner (12). The custom insecticidal toxin database was constructed with amino acid sequences of Cry and Cyt proteins, Bin-like and Mtx-like proteins, Vip1/Vip2, Vip3, and Sip1A proteins (13), accessory proteins P19 and P20, and the enhancin-like Bel protein. The Na205-3 draft genome sequence carries nine insecticidal toxin genes homologous to cry1Aa12, cry1Ab1, cry1Ab8, cry1Ba1, cry1Af1, cry1Ia10, vip1Bb1, vip2Ba2, and vip3Aa6, a putative etx_mtx toxin gene, and 1 bel (enhancin-like) gene. This ample repertoire of insecticidal genes implies that strain Na205-3 might have a wider host range than was previously thought.

Nucleotide sequence accession numbers.

This whole-genome shotgun project has been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession no. AYXQ00000000. The version described in this paper is version AYXQ01000000.