Magnetotactic ovoidal bacterium MO-1, complete genome. Magnetotactic ovoidal bacterium MO-1

Magneto-ovoid strain MO-1 was isolated from Mediterranean Sea sediment in Marseille city [1]. The hallmark of this strain is the exquisite architecture of its flagellar apparatus: twelve glycolysated flagellin proteins assemble into seven flagella [2], each being surrounded by six fibrils, and total 7 flagella and 24 fibrils organize into 7 intertwined hexagonal arrays within a sheath [3]. The robust locomotive nano-machine accounts for the capacity of the bacteria to circumvent and squeeze through obstacles [4], which might allow the bacteria swimming between different layers in chemically stratified marine sediments to find nutrient compounds favorable for their chemolithoautotrophic growth. Genome sequence comparison between the strain MO-1 and the most closely related Magnetococcus marinus MC-1 reveals homologous regions covering about 43% of the MO-1 genome with approximate 76% nucleotide sequence identity, inferring an average nucleotide identity less than the species definition cut-off of 95%. Consistently 16S rRNA gene sequence of MO-1 shows about 93.2% identity to that of M. marinus MC-1. The corresponding estimated DNA-DNA hybridization similarities are < 23% that is substantially less than the species definition value of 70%. Together these data indicate that MO-1 and MC-1 strains belong to two different species, probably even different genera. Therefore, we propose to designate the MO-1 strain as Candidate Magnetooliva massalia strain MO-1 (Ji et al., in preparation). 1. Lefèvre, C.T., et al., Isolation and characterization of a magnetotactic bacterial culture from the Mediterranean Sea. Environ. Microbiol., 2009. 11(7): p. 1646–1657. 2. Zhang, W.J., et al., Complex spatial organization and flagellin composition of flagellar propeller from marine magnetotactic ovoid strain MO-1. J Mol Biol, 2012. 416(4): p. 558-570. 3. Rua! n, J., e t al., Architecture of a flagellar apparatus in the fast-swimming magnetotactic bacterium MO-1. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2012. 109(50): p. 20643-20648. 4. Zhang, S.D., et al., Swimming behaviour and magnetotaxis function of the marine bacterium strain MO-1. Environ Microbiol Rep, 2014. 6(1): p. 14-20.