show Abstracthide AbstractOrientia tsutsugamushi is a severe but neglected obligate intracellular bacterial pathogen of the Rickettsiaceae family that causes the life-threatening human disease scrub typhus. Orientia possesses the most highly repetitive bacterial genome sequenced to date. This has hampered efforts to generate complete genome sequences using short read sequencing methodologies, and consequently there have been few studies investigating the comparative genomics of this neglected species. We report eight new high-quality genomes of Orientia tsutsugamushi, generated using PacBio single molecule long read sequencing. These strains include FPW1038, Karp, Kato, Gilliam, TA686, TA763, UT76 and UT176.