Comparative Genomics of aquaculture mycobacterium isolates

Several members within the Mycobacterium genus are known to cause invasive infections in humans and animals. Mycobacterium salmoniphilum (Msal) have been identified as the main culprit in recent freshwater fish culture outbreaks. Recent phylogenetic analysis placed some Msal strains into a separate branch with Mycobacterium franklinii (Mfra), a species known to cause infections in humans. In this work, we isolated four Mycobacterium strains from Atlantic and coho salmon freshwater cultures in Chile and performed whole genome sequencing, in which the Fastq raw data was preprocessed mapped against Msal DSM43276 genome. Subsequently, we compared the 16S rRNA gene sequences and whole genomes of the four isolates with six Msal, four Msal-like and one Mycobacterium franklinii obtained from a previous study, as well as 17 other Mycobacterium species obtained from the NCBI database.