SRA

Cyanobacteria are prokaryotic organisms that perform oxygen-evolving photosynthesis. Several cyanobacteria strains have been used as a model organism in the research fields of photosynthesis, photoacclimation, bloom formation, and metabolic engineering. On the other hand, the cyanobacteria phylum comprised morphologically, physiologically and genetically diverse strains and they are broadly distributed in the terrestrial and aquatic environments. Understanding of cyanobacteria diversity via genome sequencing of the strains deposited in the culture collection is becoming a new trend. The aim of this project is to comprehensively analyze the genomes of cyanobacteria strains in the National Collection of the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) in Japan. In 2016, we focused on the 20 cyanobacteria strains that can form heterocyst, a thick walled differentiated cell for nitrogen fixiation. The genome size of the heterocystous cyanobacteria is relatively large (5-12M bp) and contains many repeated sequences, which make it difficult to obtain high quality genome information. We sequenced the PCR-free and the long mate pair DNA libraries of these strains using the MiSeq sequencer, and performed in silico gap closing and Sanger sequencing. The assembled genomes were annotated the manually curated annotation in the genome database Cyanobase. These data will facilitate our understanding of diversity and evolution of the molecular processes among cyanobacteria phylum. This project is supported by the National Bio Resource Project in Japan.