In the modern day, the brown seaweeds can also be an appropriate feedstock for bioconversion into bioethanol ( John et al., 2011). Microbulbifer elongatus strain HZ11 was isolated from seawater of Zhoushan Islands of the East China Sea by direction isolation of the brown seaweed-degrading strain. With the secretion this website of many polysaccharidases such as alginate lyase, cellulose and amylase, strain HZ11 can degrade seaweed such as L. japonica into particles whose particle-size

are less than 10 μm. For further research of brown seaweed saccharification and fermentation of bioethanol, we have determined the genome sequence of M. elongatus strain HZ11 (= CGMCC 6242). M. elongatus HZ11 was cultivated on modified 2216 medium, which contains (per liter distilled water): yeast extract 5 g, peptone 1 g, ferric citrate 0.1 g, NaCl 19.45 g, MgCl2 · 6H2O 8.8 g, CaCl2 · 2H2O 1.8 g, KCl 0.55 g, NaHCO3 0.16 g, Na2SO4 3.24 g, KBr 0.08 g, SrCl2 34 mg, H3BO4 22 mg, NaSiO4 4 mg, NaF 2.4 mg, NH4NO3 1.6 mg, Na2HPO4 8 mg, pH 7.4 adjusted with NaOH, at 28 °C for 24 h. Genomic DNA was extracted using the method described by Marmur and Doty (1962). The genome was sequenced using paired-end sequencing technology (HiSeq 2000 system, Illumina, USA) ( Bentley et al., 2008). The shotgun library was constructed

with a 500 bp-span and a 2000 bp-span paired-end library. All clean reads were assembled into 19 scaffolds using the SOAPdenovo v.1.05 assembler ( Li et al., 2010). After manual gap-filling steps and mapping to reference sequences, a high quality draft genome sequence with 9 contigs was obtained Fulvestrant cost for further analysis. Gene prediction was performed using Glimmer v. 3.02 (Delcher et al., 2007), and functions of the gene products were annotated by BLAST + (Camacho et al., 2009) using NCBI-nr protein (Sayers et al., 2012) and Swiss-Prot databases (Bairoch et al., 2004). The rRNA and tRNA genes were identified by using RNAmmer (Lagesen et al., 2007), tRNAscan-SE (Lowe and Eddy, 1997) and Rfam (Griffiths-Jones et al., 2003)

database. Classification of predicted genes and pathways were analyzed by using COGs (Tatusov Cell press et al., 2000 and Tatusov et al., 2001) and KEGG (Kanehisa and Goto, 2000) databases. The putative carbohydrate-active enzymes were analyzed by using CAZy (Lombard et al., 2014) and Pfam (Finn et al., 2014) databases. The genome sequence of M. elongatus HZ11, with a genome size of 4,223,108 bp from 9 contigs, contains 56.70% G + C content. A total of 3293 coding sequences were predicted including 51 RNA genes and 904 hypothetical proteins. The annotation results of genome suggest that strain HZ11 has large amount of genes related to brown seaweed degradation and polysaccharide utilization. As reported, brown seaweed is composed of several polysaccharides including alginate, laminarin, fucoidan and cellulose, among which, alginate composes 30–60% of the total sugars in brown seaweed (Chapman, 1970).