Klebsiella oxytoca

Habitat

Bacteria of the genus Klebsiella are widely distributed in nature, in the soil and in water. They are also part of the normal flora of the intestinal tract, but usually in low numbers compared with E. coli. Klebsiella are opportunistic pathogens that can cause pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and bacteremia. In recent years there has been an increase in Klebsiella infections, especially in hospitals and due to multiple-antibiotic resistant strains.

Biology

Klebsiella is a Gram-negative bacterium, a cylindrical rod of size about 2 microns by 0.5 microns, thus much smaller than the cells of higher organisms such as humans. The most striking difference between most strains of Klebsiella and its close relatives E. coli and Salmonella is that Klebsiella cells normally have a thick coat of slime or extracellular polysaccharide which is called a "capsule". In culture, the bacterium will grow on artificial media to form colonies; the capsule is readily seen in these colonies. The capsule protects the cells from dessication, and may also protect them from phagocytosis when they are in an animal host. Surprisingly, many strains of Klebsiella can fix nitrogen, i.e., they can reduce atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia and amino acids. Strain M5al, isolated in the early 1950s, lacks the normal polysaccharide capsule, and is therefore amenable to genetic analysis, including transduction, and so became the organism of choice for molecular genetic studies of dinitrogen fixation and other metabolism. Originally called Aerobacter, it was later called Klebsiella pneumoniae but was recently re-classified as K. oxytoca: it differs from K. pneumoniae in numerous biochemical reactions.

Sequencing Plan

The strain being sequenced, VJSK009, is derived from the wild type strain M5al; it has a modified hsd1 allele. It is available from the Salmonella Genetic Stock Centre as SGSC4704. The genome is being sequenced to 8X coverage, using plasmid and fosmid libraries, and will be finished to an error rate of less than 1 per 10,000 bases. Automated annotation will be performed and manual annotation will continue in the labs of Michael McClelland and Kenneth Sanderson. This project is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Contacts

Name	Affiliation
Patrick Minx	The Genome Institute, Washington University School of Medicine

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Sequences & Maps

Assemblies

Name	Date	Description	Blast DBs
Klebsiella_oxytoca-1.0	Dec 06, 2005	~5.5X	contigs supercontigs

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