Skip to main content

Genome sequence of a pathogenic Corynebacterium ulcerans strain isolated from a wild boar with necrotizing lymphadenitis

Abstract

Objectives

Corynebacterium ulcerans can colonize a wide variety of animals and also humans are infected, typically by zoonotic transmission. Symptoms range from skin ulcers or systemic infections to diphtheria-like illness. In contrast, Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis is widely distributed among herds of sheep, goats and other farm animals, where it causes high economic losses due to caseous lymphadenitis. Here we describe the genome sequence of an atypical C. ulcerans strain isolated from a wild boar with necrotizing lymphadenitis. This strain has similarities to C. pseudotuberculosis.

Data description

Genome sequence data of C. ulcerans isolate W25 were generated, analyzed and taxonomical relationship to other Corynebacterium species as well as growth properties of the isolate were characterized. The genome of C. ulcerans W25 comprises 2,550,924 bp with a G+C content of 54.41% and a total of 2376 genes.

Objective

The genus Corynebacterium (C.) comprises more than one hundred species with about half of these isolated from human and animal material [1, 2]. While most species are only rarely causing disease, others are connected to severe infections. This is especially true for the group of toxigenic corynebacteria [3], i.e. C. diphtheriae, C. ulcerans and C. pseudotuberculosis. C. diphtheriae is almost exclusively restricted to humans and is the etiological agent of diphtheria. In contrast, C. ulcerans can colonize a wide variety of animals and also humans are infected, typically by zoonotic transmission. In the case of human infections, skin ulcers and diphtheria-like illnesses are most common, besides cases of systemic infections. C. pseudotuberculosis is widely distributed among herds of sheep, goats and other farm animals, where it causes high economic losses due to caseous lymphadenitis. Human infections with this species are extremely rare and restricted to persons with close animal contact.

Here, we describe the genome sequence of an atypical C. ulcerans strain isolated from a wild boar with necrotizing lymphadenitis. Sequence data of C. ulcerans isolate W25 were generated and assembled and taxonomical relationship to other Corynebacterium species was characterized. Since only a very limited number of C. ulcerans whole genome sequences are available, the data may be valuable for taxonomical investigations and the prediction of pathogenicity based on genome mining approaches [4,5,6,7].

Data description

The data represent genome sequence information of C. ulcerans strain W25, isolated from a hunted wild boar (Sus scrofa). The chromosomal DNA of C. ulcerans W25 was sequenced using Illumina MiSeq and deposited at DDBJ/ENA/GenBank under the accession VFEM00000000 (Table 1), which is also the version described in this paper. The genome assembly consisted of 13 contigs with an estimated total size of 2,550,924 bp and a G+C content of 54.41%. A 50-fold coverage of the genome sequence was obtained with an N50 of 328,900 bp. A total of 2376 genes with 2013 coding genes, 304 pseudogenes, and 59 RNA genes were identified. Compared to five published genome sequences [8, 9] no significant variations in respect to sequence length, the number of coding sequences and RNA genes was found. In contrast, the G+C content of the genomic DNA of the W25 strain is with 54.4%, 1.0% to 1.1% higher than in other C. ulcerans strains (see Data set 2, Table 1).

Table 1 Overview of data files/data sets

The data set provided includes a PDF file (Data set 1) containing two images of the growth behavior of the isolate as well as a phylogenetic tree of corynebacteria reflecting an atypical phenotype of C. ulcerans W25 by its close taxonomical relationship to C. pseudotuberculosis (Table 1).

Methodology

Growth of bacteria

Corynebacterium ulcerans isolate W25 was isolated from a hunted wild boar and propagated as a pure culture on Columbia Blood Agar (CBA) plates. On this solid medium, the bacteria had a waxy appearance and showed no hemolysis (Data set 1, Table 1). For subsequent experiments, C. ulcerans strains were grown in Brain Heart Infusion (BHI) containing 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS) and 0.05% Tween 80.

Genome sequencing

After 72 h of cultivation in BHI DNA was prepared using QIAGEN Genomic-tips 20/G and a QIAGEN Genomic DNA Buffer Set (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany). The DNA quality was examined by using a Qubit 2.0 fluorometer (Life Technologies, Darmstadt, Germany) and by agarose gel electrophoresis. Nextera XT Library Preparation Kit library according to the manufacturer’s instruction. Sequencing was done with an Illumina MiSeq run 2 × 300 bp. Quality was assessed and assembled with SPAdes v. 3.11.1 (with the additional command-careful) [10] was used and for annotation the Prokka annotation pipeline 1.12-beta in standard settings [11] as described before [12]. The mean coverage was 236 reads with a standard deviation of 71 reads. Mapped to the Corynebacterium ulcerans BR-AD22 77.4% was covered with a mean coverage of 57 reads.

Data analysis

To assess the phylogenetic classification of assorted Corynebacterium species PhyloPhlAn was used with the annotation files resulting from Prokka. The analysis was performed with standard-setting on all samples and visualized with Dendroscope as described before [12,13,14].

Limitations

The data represent the first characterization of genome sequence data of a newly isolated C. ulcerans strain. For further analyses, it may be necessary to close existing gaps and improve and cure the current annotation. For example, long-read sequencing (PacBio or MinIon) could generate in a hybrid assembly a more conclusive picture of the genome structure and possibly regulative aspects of protein expression.

Availability of data materials

The data described in this Data note can be freely and openly accessed on DDBJ/ENA/GenBank under the accession https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/VFEM00000000.1/. Please see Table 1 and Reference list for details and links to the data.

Abbreviations

BHI:

brain heart infusion

CBA:

Columbia Blood Agar

FBS:

fetal bovine serum

bp:

base pair(s)

References

  1. List of Prokaryotic names with Standing in Nomenclature. http://www.bacterio.net/corynebacterium.html. Accessed 11 Jun 2019.

  2. Tauch A. The Family Corynebacteriaceae. In: Rosenberg E, Delong E, Lory S, Stackebrandt E, Thompson F, editors. The prokaryotes. Berlin: Springer; 2014. p. 239–77.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Riegel P, et al. Taxonomy of Corynebacterium diphtheriae and related taxa, with recognition of Corynebacterium ulcerans sp. nov. nom. rev. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 1995;126(3):271–6.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Hacker E, et al. Corynebacterium ulcerans, an emerging human pathogen. Future Microbiol. 2016;11:1191–208.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Guimaraes LC, et al. Draft genome sequence of toxigenic Corynebacterium ulcerans Strain 03-8664 isolated from a human throat. Genome Announc. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1128/genomeA.00719-16.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  6. Guimaraes LC, et al. Draft genome sequence of toxigenic Corynebacterium ulcerans Strain 04-7514, isolated from a dog in France. Genome Announc. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1128/genomeA.00172-16.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  7. Guimaraes LC, et al. Draft genome sequence of Corynebacterium ulcerans Strain 04-3911, isolated from humans. Genome Announc. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1128/genomeA.00171-16.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  8. Trost E, et al. Comparative analysis of two complete Corynebacterium ulcerans genomes and detection of candidate virulence factors. BMC Genomics. 2011;12:383.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Subedi R, et al. Genomic analyses reveal two distinct lineages of Corynebacterium ulcerans strains. New Microbes New Infect. 2018;25:7–13.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Bankevich A, et al. SPAdes: a new genome assembly algorithm and its applications to single-cell sequencing. J Comput Biol. 2012;19(5):455–77.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. Seemann T. Prokka: rapid prokaryotic genome annotation. Bioinformatics. 2014;30(14):2068–9.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Busch A, et al. Revisiting Francisella tularensis subsp. holarctica, causative agent of tularemia in Germany with bioinformatics: new insights in genome structure, DNA methylation and comparative phylogenetic analysis. Front Microbiol. 2018;9:344.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Segata N, et al. PhyloPhlAn is a new method for improved phylogenetic and taxonomic placement of microbes. Nat Commun. 2013;4:2304.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Huson DH, et al. Dendroscope: an interactive viewer for large phylogenetic trees. BMC Bioinform. 2007;8:460.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Bethesda: National Library of Medicine (US), N.C.f.B.I. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/. Accessed 24 Sept 2019.

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank Anja Hackbart for skillful technical assistance. Anne Busch was supported by a Grant of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the framework of the project Ess-B.A.R. (FKZ 13N13983).

Funding

The research project received no external funding.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

ABus sequenced and analyzed the genome and was responsible for data storage; conceptualization, supervision of experiments and administration was carried out by HH. JM was involved in the growth and data analysis and writing of the draft. The manuscript was written by ABur and finalized by ABus. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anne Busch.

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Busch, A., Möller, J., Burkovski, A. et al. Genome sequence of a pathogenic Corynebacterium ulcerans strain isolated from a wild boar with necrotizing lymphadenitis. BMC Res Notes 12, 692 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-019-4704-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-019-4704-3

Keywords