WGS of soil bacteria from Pinus radiata forests.

Pinus radiata is the most widely grown plantation tree species in New Zealand. Essential to forest productivity and health are the biology and functioning of the forest soil. The Tree Root Microbiome Project is using NGS of eDNA from rhizosphere and soil samples to understand the community of microbial life in these compartments. Forest soils are understudied and contain few representative cultured species with sequenced genomes. This makes the identification of forest microbes difficult. An obvious path forward is increasing the representation of forest soil microorganism genomes in international databases. In this study, we are submitting annotated genome sequences of newly discovered bacterial species that were isolated from Pinus radiata forests, with an emphasis on finding unique species from diverse niches.