Developing a molecular toolbox for Staphylococcus haemolyticus. PacBio SMRT sequeincing of Staphylococcus haemolyticus

Staphylococcus haemolyticus is common among normal skin flora, but also increasingly common as a cause of nosocomial infections. The causative links between virulent phenotypes and responsible genes are not yet well-established, however. Active restriction modification (RM) systems in staphylococci make genetic modification challenging due to their ability to use methylation patterns to detect and destroy incoming foreign DNA. In order to investigate the genes responsible for virulence, it is necessary to develop molecular tools which can evade the S. haemolyticus restriction modification (RM) systems. The first step in this process is to determine the methylation patterns of selected S. haemolyticus isolates. Here we present the genomes of 10 S. haemolyticus isolates which underwent PacBio Single Molecule Real-Time (SMRT) sequencing and methylome analysis.