Magnetospirillum magnetotacticum MS-1 Genome sequencing

An assembly of the MS-1 genome has previously been deposited in GenBank (GenBank assembly ID: GCA_000166875.1). However, annotation of that assembly revealed that it is heavily contaminated with sequences from an unindentified Methylobacter strain, evidenced by it being twice the expected size (9.2Mb) and by the presence of two sets of rRNAs, one of them being a best match to Methylobacter rRNAs, as well as of numerous protein coding genes -- more than 60\% of predicted ORFs -- whose best BLAST matches were proteins from various sequenced Methylobacter strains), including the presence of probable chimeric contigs. We therefore carried out de novo whole-genome sequencing of the MS-1 strain.