Draft Genome Sequence of a Rare Israeli Clinical Isolate of Burkholderia pseudomallei Ofir Israeli, a Inbar Cohen-Gihon, a Tal Brosh-Nissimov, b,c Shay Weiss, d Anat Zvi, a Adi Beth-Din, a Ohad Shifman, a Ma’ayan Israeli, a Uri Elia, a Shirley Lazar, a Erez Bar-Haim, a Ofer Cohen, a Theodor Chitlaru a a Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Israel Institute for Biological Research, Ness Ziona, Israel b Infectious Diseases Unit, Assuta Ashdod University Hospital, Ashdod, Israel c Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Beersheba, Israel d Department of Infectious Diseases, Israel Institute for Biological Research, Ness Ziona, Israel ABSTRACT We report here the draft genome sequence of Burkholderia pseudomal- lei MAA2018. This highly virulent strain was isolated in 2018 from the first melioido- sis case in Israel associated with recreational travel to Goa, India. T he Gram-negative bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei is the etiological cause of melioidosis, a severe zoonotic infectious disease (165,000 global estimated annual morbidities, including 89,000 deaths [1]) that is endemic mainly in Southeast Asia and northern Australia (2). B. pseudomallei is considered a potential bioweapon (CDC category B) due to the prevalence in soil and water, multiple routes of infection, and especially high virulence associated with inhalation exposure, low infectious dose, high mortality rates, native resistance to a wide range of antibiotics, and nonavailability of a vaccine (3, 4). Melioidosis is manifested by nonspecific symptoms that hinder identification of the disease and consequently may inadver- tently be diagnosed as tuberculosis or a common form of pneumonia (1, 5, 6). The B. pseudomallei genome, consisting of two chromosomes, is highly plastic, resulting in a high number of strains exhibiting significant variability in genetic features (7). We report here the draft genome sequence of a clinical B. pseudomallei strain isolated from a melioidosis case diagnosed in Israel and associated with recreational travel to Goa, India. This is the third documented clinical isolate of melioidosis in Israel (8, 9) and the first case originating from India. The isolate, referred to as B. pseudomallei MAA2018 (melioidosis case from Assuta Hospital, Ashdod, Israel, in 2018) was isolated from sputum collected from a 29-year-old male returning from Goa, India, suffering from a subacute upper-lobe pneumonia of a 6-month duration. The identification of the infectious agent as B. pseudomallei was initially suggested by a metabolism-specific bacterial identification system (Vitek XL2) and matrix-assisted laser desorption ioniza- tion–time of flight (MALDI-TOF) spectrum (Vitek mass spectrometer [MS]) and subse- quently confirmed by PCR analysis, as described previously (10). Virulence analysis of B. pseudomallei MAA2018 in the murine model of melioidosis established an intranasal 50% lethal dose (LD 50 ; determined by following for 30 days the survival of mice inoculated with increasing doses of bacteria and calculated by linear regression using the GraphPad Prism version 5 statistical analysis software [described in references 11 and 12]) of 6 CFU and 30 CFU in the BALB/c and C57BL/6J strains of mice, respectively, suggesting that it belongs to a group of highly virulent B. pseudomallei strains (13). For the genome sequencing of B. pseudomallei MAA2018, DNA was extracted from a 40-h-old colony grown on Luria broth (LB) agar using the QIAamp DNA blood minikit (Qiagen). A Nextera XT paired-end library (Illumina) was prepared from 1 ng DNA. The library was sequenced on a MiSeq platform (Illumina) using paired-end sequencing Citation Israeli O, Cohen-Gihon I, Brosh- Nissimov T, Weiss S, Zvi A, Beth-Din A, Shifman O, Israeli M, Elia U, Lazar S, Bar-Haim E, Cohen O, Chitlaru T. 2019. Draft genome sequence of a rare Israeli clinical isolate of Burkholderia pseudomallei. Microbiol Resour Announc 8:e00281-19. https://doi.org/10.1128/MRA .00281-19. Editor Frank J. Stewart, Georgia Institute of Technology Copyright © 2019 Israeli et al. This is an open- access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Address correspondence to Theodor Chitlaru, theodorc@iibr.gov.il. O.I. and I.C.-G. contributed equally to this work. Received 31 March 2019 Accepted 19 April 2019 Published 9 May 2019 [This article was published on 9 May 2019 with a byline that lacked Shay Weiss. The byline was updated in the current version, posted on 5 September 2019.] GENOME SEQUENCES crossm Volume 8 Issue 19 e00281-19 mra.asm.org 1 on May 21, 2020 by guest http://mra.asm.org/ Downloaded from on May 21, 2020 by guest http://mra.asm.org/ Downloaded from on May 21, 2020 by guest http://mra.asm.org/ Downloaded from