Genome Sequence of Paenibacillus wulumuqiensis sp. nov., a Bioflocculant-Producing Species.

Paenibacillus wulumuqiensis sp. nov. is a novel strain that can produce bioflocculants. Here, we report 5.37-Mb assembly of its genome sequence and other useful information, including the coding sequences (CDSs) responsible for the biosynthesis of polysaccharide-based bioflocculants, cold-shock protein, and vitamin production.

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Over the past decades, more and more attention has been paid worldwide to the field of industrial wastewater treatment, and the use of bioflocculants has proved to be a superior method for removing pollutants from wastewater due to its harmlessness and biodegradability compared with many existing inorganic and organic high-polymer flocculants (1, 2). Among the bioflocculants, the polysaccharide-based bioflocculants (PSBs) have drawn particular attention in recent years, especially with respect to wastewater treatment, due to their unique structure, excellent physical-chemical and rheological properties, high efficiency, and excellent selectivity (3). Recently, our group isolated, from a cold spring sample from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (China), a novel species of Paenibacillus wulumuqiensis sp. nov. (= CPCC 100602T = JCM 30284T), which can produce PSBs naturally (4). Comparisons with 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed that the novel strain had the highest similarity to P. hunanensis FeL05T (96%) (5). However, the phylogenetic distances from recognized species indicated that P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov. is not affiliated to any of these recognized species and the proportion of the saturated straight-chain fatty acid C16:0 was relatively high (4). We can therefore conclude that this strain represents a novel species of the genus Paenibacillus. As a result, studying the genetic information and characteristics of P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov. is desired to further investigate its mechanism.

Here, we present the draft genome sequence of strain P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov., obtained using the Illumina HiSeq 2000 system. The reads were assembled with SOAPdenovo (6, 7), and the sequence was annotated using the RAST annotation server (8); a KEGG metabolic pathway was also constructed. A library containing 500 inserts was constructed, and sequencing was performed based on the paired-end strategy of 484 reads to produce 773 Mb of filtered sequences, representing a 125-fold coverage of the genome. The sequence of P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov. comprises 5,240,711 bp with a G+C content of 49.19%, which was assembled into 41 contigs and 33 scaffolds. It contains 4,664 open reading frames (ORFs), 80 tRNA genes, and 3 rRNA genes identified by Glimmer version 3.02 (9), GeneMark (10), tRNAscan-SE (11), and RNAmmer (12).

According to the genomic analysis of strain P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov., we identified 52 ORFs related to the polysaccharide-based bioflocculants. Strain P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov. has 12 ORFs related to trehalose synthesis, which makes us believe that it could be related to a cold-resistance mechanism since trehalose is regarded as a molecular chaperone. Seven ORFs related to the cold-shock protein were also found in this novel strain. Additionally, the biosynthesis of vitamin B1 was annotated in P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov., as there were 55 ORFs related to thiamine metabolism. A complete genome sequence will be included in the future to reveal the unique molecular characteristics of strain P. wulumuqiensis sp. nov.

Nucleotide sequence accession numbers.

This whole-genome shotgun project has been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession number LAQP00000000. The version described in this paper is the first version, LAQP01000000.