Genome Sequence of Bacillus simplex Strain P558, Isolated from a Human Fecal Sample.

Bacillus simplex strain P558 was isolated from a fecal sample of a 25-year-old Saudi male. We sequenced the 5.98-Mb genome of the strain and compared it to that of B. simplex strain 1NLA3E.

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Bacillus simplex was first described in 1901 by Meyer and Gottheil (1). This bacterium is an environmental microorganism, notably found in soil. To date, it has not been found in humans. Here, we sequenced the genome from B. simplex strain P558 that was isolated from a fecal sample of a 25-year-old Saudi male living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as part of a culturomics study aiming to isolate all bacterial species present in the human gut (2). Based on the sequencing of the complete 16S rRNA gene, strain P558 was found to exhibit 99.93% sequence identity with B. simplex strain AM2 (GenBank accession no. JQ435679), its closest phylogenetic relative. B. simplex strain P558 was deposited in the CSUR collection under number CSUR P558.

We sequenced the whole genome of B. simplex strain P558 with the MiSeq sequencer (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA) using a mate-pair Nextera XT sample preparation kit (Illumina) in a 2× 250-bp run. The Illumina reads were trimmed using Trimmomatic (3) and then assembled with the SPAdes software (4). The obtained contigs were combined using the SSPACE (5) and Opera (6) softwares, helped by GapFiller (7) to reduce the set. Some manual refinements using the CLC Genomics software (CLC bio, Aarhus, Denmark) improved the genome assembly quality. Overall, the draft genome of B. simplex strain P558 consists of 8 scaffolds and a single gap, for a total size of 5,983,568 bp and a G+C content of 40.23%. The coding DNA sequences were predicted using Prodigal (8), and functional annotation was achieved using BLAST+ (9) and HMMER3 (10) against the UniProtKB database (11). Noncoding genes and miscellaneous features were predicted using the RNAmmer (12), ARAGORN (13), Rfam (14), Pfam (15), and Infernal (16) softwares.

The genome assembly of B. simplex strain P558 consists of 8 contigs and contains 5,814 protein-coding genes and 169 predicted RNA genes, including 11 rRNAs (3 complete rRNA operons), 50 tRNAs, 1 transfer-messenger RNA (tmRNA), and 107 miscellaneous RNAs. The coding capacity was 4,862,007 bp (81.26% of the total genome). Among the predicted genes, 4,248 genes (73%) matched a least one sequence in the Clusters of Orthologous Groups database (17), with BLASTp default parameters. In addition, 296 (5.09%) and 900 (15.48%) genes were annotated as encoding putative and hypothetical proteins, respectively.

In comparison with the genome of B. simplex strain 1NLA3E (GenBank accession no. NC_021171), the phylogenetically closest available sequenced genome, strain P558, is larger (5,983,568 and 4,815,602 bp, respectively) and has a higher G+C content (40.23 and 37.95%, respectively) and more protein-coding genes (5,814 and 4,410 genes, respectively), but it has a smaller ratio of genes per Mb (972 and 1,092 genes/Mb, respectively).

Nucleotide sequence accession numbers.

The genome sequence from B. simplex strain P558 has been deposited in EMBL under accession numbers CCXW01000001 to CCXW01000008.