Microbiology

Biography

Biography: Paula Istvan

Abstract

The RDX, hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine, is an explosive, extensively used by the military and in the construction industry. It poses harmful and deleterious threats to the environment and causes soil, sediment, and groundwater contamination. The microorganisms involved in RDX biodegradation are limited by a small fraction of RDX isolates, because approximately 99% of microorganisms are uncultivable under laboratory conditions. Using a cultivation-independent molecular technique as sequencing is necessary to probe the insight into RDX-degrading microorganisms. Rhodococcus YH1 and Rhodococcus T7 and Gordonia YY1 stains were isolated from contaminated environments and cultivated with RDX as sole nitrogen source. Genomic DNA was extracted from a single colony and sequencing was performed using an Illumina Miseq2v-500 to generate 250x2paired-end reads. Raw sequence data were quality trimmed, and de novo  assembly was performed in the software package Spades. Prokka tool was used to annotate the genome using the UniProt database. Plasmid Spades program from Spades package were used for plasmid assembly. The draft genome of all stains is approximately 6 Mb, distributed in more the 200 Scaffolds. The average coverage was approximately 35X. The annotation identified unique genes, coding sequences, transfer-messenger RNA, transfer RNAs and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR). The functional information was analyzed both individually and as in metabolic networks generated by KEGG Pathway Maps. This genomes analyses will improve our knowledge of RDX degradation genes and metabolic pathways and contribute to the development of more efficient bioremediation of polluted environments.