Candida species are the fourth most common of nosocomial infections worldwide and C. glabrata,whose prevalence is rising, is the second most common fungal pathogen. Initial sequencing and analyses of this organism was done in 2004 for lab strain CBS138/ATCC2001, which has a highly plastic genome. Another widely used lab strain, BG2, has undergone three reciprocal translocations relative to CBS138 and is generally more virulent than CBS138.
We sequenced 10 Israeli clinical C. glabrata isolates and all of them contained translocations and genome rearrangements suggesting they were more closely related thef unsequenced BG2 strain than to CBS138. Thus, we set out to sequence an annotate the BG2 genome, with the goal of producing a scaffold useful for analyzing clinical isolate sequences.
Here sequenced the BG2 genomic DNA using Illumina sequencing and assembled reads using Veltet. Full contigs were constructed using different scaffolding assembling programs (Space and Mummer) to compare their utility. The genes were annotated based on their similarities to the previously published genomes of S. cerevisiae and C. glabrata CBS138. We characterized translocations events as well as all SNPs present relative to CBS138 and relative to several clinical isolates. Of course, CBS138 and BG2 share general synteny. However, striking differences between the two strains include increased numbers of gene family members connected to virulence traits in BG2 and very different rates of SNP acquisition. Details of the sequence and SNP analysis will be presented.
