Draft Genome Sequence of Pseudomonas psychrophila MTCC 12324, Isolated from the Arctic at 79°N.

Pseudomonas psychrophila MTCC 12324 is a facultatively psychrophilic bacterium isolated from the Arctic fjord Ny-alesund in the Svalbard Archipelago. Here, we present a 5.2-Mb draft genome sequence of P. psychrophila MTCC 12324, reported for the first time, from the Arctic. This enables a study of the cold adaptation mechanisms to survive under the extreme cold conditions.

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

The polar Arctic region is an unexplored area of the earth, and that environment possesses microorganisms that permanently thrive at temperatures at and around the freezing point of water. In the present investigation, a Gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium, Pseudomonas psychrophila MTCC 12324 (also known as RGCB 166), was isolated from fjord water in the Arctic having a temperature of 2°C. The test organism was identified as P. psychrophila MTCC 12324 by sequencing its 16S rRNA gene (GenBank accession no. JX271040.1). The bacterium grows at a temperature range between 4°C and 30°C, with optimal growth at a temperature range of 20 to 25°C. Its growth pattern indicates that the test organism falls in the category of being facultatively psychrophilic. Previously, a cold-adapted sulfamethoxazole-degrading P. psychrophila strain was isolated from sewage effluent in China (1), and another isolate of P. psychrophila was reported from cold storage in Japan (2). In the present study, we report P. psychrophila MTCC 12324, isolated from the Arctic, for the first time.

The genome of P. psychrophila MTCC 12324 was sequenced using an Illumina HiSeq 2000 and an Illumina MiSeq system. The reads were assembled into 150 large contigs (>2,330 bp) using ABySS (3), SPAdes (4), Velvet (5), and SOAPdenovo2 (6). The contig N50 is approximately 57.3 kb, and the largest contig assembled is approximately 235.3 kb. The draft sequence consists of 5,269,174 bases, with a mean G+C content of 57.52%. A total of 5,036 coding sequences were predicted using Glimmer (7), and 51 structural RNAs were identified from the contigs using tRNAscan-SE (8). Several genes pertaining to cold adaptation, such as fatty acid desaturase, polynucleotide phosphorylase, and peptidyl-prolyl cis-trans isomerase, have been identified from the sequenced genome of P. psychrophila MTCC 12324. Genomic information acquired through whole-genome sequencing will shed light on the complicated cold adaptation mechanisms of bacteria, which are very diverse in nature.

Nucleotide sequence accession numbers.

This whole-genome shotgun project has been deposited in GenBank under the accession no. LBHT00000000. The version described in this paper is the first version, LBHT00000000.1