Draft Genome Sequence of Heavy Metal-Resistant Aeromonas veronii CTe-01, Isolated from a Peruvian Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Here, we report a draft genome sequence of Aeromonas veronii strain CTe-01 (4.5 Mb), a hemolytic, heavy metal-resistant bacterium isolated from a wastewater treatment plant located at Cachiche, Ica, Peru. These characteristics could be used for bioremediation of contaminated environments.

ANNOUNCEMENT

Aeromonas veronii causes infections and death in fish (1, 2) and other freshwater animals (3). It is an emerging pathogen involved in enteric (4) and extraintestinal infections in humans (5–8), and its pathogenicity is usually multifactorial (6). Additionally, it is routinely oxacillin, ampicillin, tetracycline, streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and erythromycin resistant (1, 9). It is typically a Gram-negative, lactose-negative, and oxidase-positive bacterium that has been isolated from soils, food, animals, and different aquatic sources (10, 11). Studies of heavy metal resistance genes in A. veronii are limited, so the study of its genome is important because, like other Aeromonas species, it harbors heavy metal resistance genes, including those for mercury, cobalt, zinc, cadmium, and chromium resistance, among others (12). Frequently, A. veronii harbors mobile elements, such as plasmids, insertion sequences (IS), transposons, genes associated with integrons, and bacteriophages (12–14), which participate in horizontal transfer and diffusion of heavy metal resistance and antibiotic resistance to other environmental bacteria (15–17).

A. veronii CTe-01 was isolated from a wastewater sample at Cachiche, Ica, Peru (14°07′06.00ʺS, 75°43′34.89ʺW; 391 m above sea level [masl]) using Luria Bertani (LB) medium supplemented with potassium tellurite (75 μg/ml). It is a hemolytic bacterium which grows in the presence of HgCl2 (10 μg/ml). For its identification, biochemical characteristics were evaluated using an automatic Vitek 2 compact system with Gram-negative (GN) bacterial identification (ID) cards (bioMérieux), and the 16S rRNA gene was sequenced by Macrogen, Inc. (USA) (GenBank accession number MK876839.1).

Pure cultures were grown in Luria Bertani broth containing 100 μg/ml ampicillin and incubated at 37°C for 12 h. Genomic DNA was extracted using a DNeasy blood and tissue kit (Qiagen, Germany) and sequenced at Macrogen, Inc. (South Korea) using a HiSeq 2000 platform with 101-bp paired-end reads (TruSeq DNA PCR-free library), producing 2,145,830,850 bp with a total of 21,245,850 reads. Unless otherwise stated, default parameters were used for all software. Reads were checked for quality using FastQC version 0.11.5 (Babraham Bioinformatics, Cambridge, UK) and assembled de novo using SPAdes version 3.11 (with the “-careful” and “-plasmid” settings) (18) without trimming the reads to avoid losing information; contigs were reordered with Mauve version 2015-02-26 (19). After removal of small contigs (<200 bp) and contaminants, 272 contigs were obtained (total length, 4,641,822 bp; N50, 79,963 bp; L50, 22; GC content, 58.64%; genome coverage, ∼383×) (QUAST Web interface [20]). Annotation was carried out using the NCBI Prokaryotic Genome Automatic Annotation Pipeline version 4.8 (21) and predicted 4,332 genes, 4,283 coding DNA sequences (CDS), 49 RNA genes (4 rRNAs, 40 tRNAs, 5 noncoding RNAs [ncRNAs]), 162 pseudogenes, and 1 CRISPR array. ResFinder version 3.2 analyses (DTU, Denmark) (22) identified 34 beta-lactam resistance genes and 1 colistin resistance gene (see Table I at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9828173).

Analyses of metal resistance were performed using BLASTX with the BacMet2 experimentally confirmed resistance gene database version 2.0 (http://bacmet.biomedicine.gu.se/download/BacMet2_EXP_database.fasta) (23). A total of 195 genes were found to be associated with the bacterial chromosome, 25 genes were associated with plasmids, and 5 genes were present in both genetic elements. Resistance genes for Cu (n = 30), Zn (n = 23), Co (n = 19), Ni (n = 17), As (n = 13), Cd (n = 12), Fe (n = 11), Te (n = 10), and others (Sb, Ag, Cr, Hg, Mn, W, Mg, Se, Au, Mo, Al, V, Ga, and Pb) were identified (see Table II at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9828173).

Data availability.

The genome sequence of CTe-01 has been deposited at the GenBank database under the accession number VATZ00000000. The raw data are available at the SRA under run number SRR9052997.