THE WHOLE GENOME SEQUENCE OF THE RICE PATHOGEN BURKHOLERIA GLUMAE

¹ School of Agricultural Biotechnology, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University, Suwon 441-744, Korea

² School of Agricultural Biotechnology, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University, Suwon 441-744; Crop Functional Genomics Center, 21st Century Frontier Research Program, Korean Ministry of Science and Technology, Korea

Burkholderia glumae, a causal agent of rice seedling root and grain rot, is a major limiting factor of rice yield throughout the rice-growing countries. To better understand the genetic basis of pathogenicity of the bacterium, we have initiated a program to sequence the whole genome of B. glumae based on random shotgun and cosmid library-end sequencing approaches. Twenty four scaffolds, totaling approximately up to 7.22 Mb (~ 65% GC content), were obtained from the sequence information of approxiamtely 7-fold genome coverage based on 500 bp readlength. The gap closure is now underway using primer walking strategy. B. glumae showed high sequence similarity (~ 87% at the nucleotide level) with B. pseudomallei (7.25Mb, 68% G+C content) and B. fungorum LB400 (8.1Mb), the human pathogenic and outstanding PCB-degrading bacteria, respectively. In addition, a preliminary annotation revealed that the B. glumae genome encodes approximately 6,700 proteins with 5,400 COGs. Thirty three and 10% of top hit genes of B. glumae and B. pseudomallei were from Ralstonia solanacearum and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, suggesting that the genus Burkholderia is closely related to Ralstonia and Pseudomonas. Comparative genomics between Burkholderia genomes (B. glumae, B. pseudomallei, B. mallei, and B. fungorum) will provide common and uncommon natures of human and plant diseases caused by Burkholderia.