Draft genomes of three Sneathia vaginalis isolates from a patient with bacterial vaginosis

Abstract

Sneathia vaginalis, a fastidious pathogen of the female reproductive tract, is implicated in obstetric and gynecologic pathologies, including spontaneous preterm birth and bacterial vaginosis. Here, we report the successful cultivation and genomic sequencing of three Sneathia vaginalis isolates collected via a vaginal swab from a patient with bacterial vaginosis.

Keywords: Sneathia; bacterial vaginosis.

Fig 1

Core genome phylogenetic tree depicting Sneathia vaginalis isolates WSU1, WSU2, and WSU4 compared to the six publicly available Sneathia spp. genomes excluding metagenome-assembled genomes. All assemblies were annotated with PGAP version 2024-04-27.build7426. Core genes of these genomes were computed in EDGAR version 3.2 by checking for reciprocal best BLAST hits against all other genomes with Sneathia vaginalis Sn35 as the reference genome (15). Alignments of each core gene set were generated with MUSCLE and concatenated (16). A phylogenetic tree was constructed with the neighbor-joining algorithm as implemented in the PHYLIP package (17). To verify the tree topology, 1,000 bootstrap iterations were calculated. Branch support was above 85.5% for all branches, with all but three showing 100% support. The core consisted of 433 genes per genome in 13 genomes (5,629 genes in total). The core alignment had 175,990 amino acid residues (2,287,870 residues in total). GenBank accession numbers are given in square brackets. Sneathia spp. isolated from vaginal swabs were highlighted in bold. Three genomes from the closely related genus Oceanivirga and a Fusobacterium nucleatum genome were included for comparison. Bar length is equivalent to 0.01 nucleotide substitutions per site.