Genome Sequence of Staphylococcus aureus PX03, an Acetoin-Producing Strain with a Small-Sized Genome.

Staphylococcus aureus PX03 can produce acetoin efficiently. Here, we present a 2.38-Mb assembly of its genome sequence, which might provide further insights into the molecular mechanism of its acetoin biosynthesis to further improve its biotechnological applications.

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Staphylococcus aureus is a Gram-positive facultative anaerobe which belongs to the Staphylococcus family. It is an opportunistic human bacterial pathogen responsible for nosocomial and community-associated infections (1). Staphylococcus aureus has been demonstrated to produce acetoin, a flavoring agent widely used in the food, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries (2). Here, we report Staphylococcus aureus PX03, a strain which exhibited the potential for use in the industrial production of acetoin. The yield of acetoin reached 41 g/liter with S. aureus PX03 in a flask, which was significantly higher than yields for other reported strains. S. aureus PX03 was isolated from a soil sample in Hunan Province, China. The size of the genome is about 2.38 Mb, which is smaller than that of all other sequenced Staphylococcus aureus genomes (2.65 to 2.95 Mb). The genome data provide useful information for further metabolic reconstruction of the pathways for acetoin production.

The draft genome sequence of Staphylococcus aureus strain PX03 was obtained by high-throughput whole-genome shotgun sequencing using Illumina Hiseq 2000 sequencing technology. A 468-bp Illumina paired-end library produced 5,934,226 reads (read length, 90 bp) totaling 502 Mb. The short reads were assembled into genomes using SOAPdenovo, version 2.04 (3), resulting in 17 contigs. The protein-coding open reading frames (ORFs) were predicted using Glimmer version 3.02 (4), tRNA genes were predicted using tRNAscan-SE 1.2 (5), and rRNA genes were predicted using RNAmmer 1.2 (6) and were annotated using the Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases (7, 8). A comprehensive annotation and comparative genome analysis are under way.

The size of the S. aureus PX03 genome is about 2.38 Mb, which is smaller than that of all other sequenced Staphylococcus genomes. The GC content is 32.86%. A total of 2,506 coding regions, 57 tRNA genes, and 5 rRNA loci were detected. Over 87% of genes were assigned to specific Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COG) database functional groups.

Accession number(s).

This whole-genome shotgun project has been deposited at GenBank under the accession no. LFOJ00000000. The version described in this paper is the first version, LFOJ01000000.