Genome sequence of the model plant pathogen Pectobacterium carotovorum SCC1

Abstract

Bacteria of the genus Pectobacterium are economically important plant pathogens that cause soft rot disease on a wide variety of plant species. Here, we report the genome sequence of Pectobacterium carotovorum strain SCC1, a Finnish soft rot model strain isolated from a diseased potato tuber in the early 1980's. The genome of strain SCC1 consists of one circular chromosome of 4,974,798 bp and one circular plasmid of 5524 bp. In total 4451 genes were predicted, of which 4349 are protein coding and 102 are RNA genes.

Keywords: Finland; Necrotroph; Pectobacterium; Plant pathogen; Potato; Soft rot.

Fig. 1

Photomicrograph of Gram stained exponentially growing Pectobacterium carotovorum SCC1 cells. A light microscope with 100× magnification was used

Fig. 2

Maximum likelihood tree of Pectobacterium carotovorum SCC1 and other closely related Pectobacterium strains. The phylogenetic tree was constructed from the seven housekeeping genes (dnaN, fusA, gyrB, recA, rplB, rpoS and gyrA). The concatenated sequences were aligned using MAFFT multiple sequence alignment program (version 7) with default parameters [42]. The phylogenetic tree was built in RAxML (Randomized Axelerated Maximum Likelihood) program with Maximum likelihood (ML) inference [43]. 88 different nucleotide substitution models were tested with jModelTest 2.0 and the best model was selected using Akaike information criterion (AIC) [44]. Bootstrap values from 1000 replicates are shown in each branch. Dickeya solani IPO2222 was used as the outgroup. Type strains are marked with T after the strain name. GenBank accession numbers are presented in the parentheses. The scale bar indicates 0.04 substitutions per nucleotide position

Fig. 3

Circular maps of the chromosome and plasmid of Pectobacterium carotovorum SCC1. Rings from the outside to the center: Genes on forward strand (colored by COG categories), Genes on reverse strand (colored by COG categories), GC content, GC skew. Maps were generated using the CGView Server [45]