GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Clostridium cellulovorans 743B was isolated from a wood chip pile and is an anaerobic and mesophilic spore-forming bacterium. This organism degrades native substrates in soft biomass such as corn fiber and rice straw efficiently by producing an extracellular enzyme complex called the cellulosome. Here we report the genome sequence of C. cellulovorans 743B. The biotechnological potential of polysaccharolytic enzymes has resulted in the isolation and characterization of a large number of anaerobic, Gram-positive, spore-forming bacteria, the majority of which have been allocated to the genus Clos-tridium. Among clostridia, the cellulosomes produced by Clos-tridium species are particularly designed for efficient degrada-tion of plant cell wall polysaccharides. The component parts of the multicomponent complex are integrated by virtue of a unique family of integrating modules, the cohesins and the dockerins, whose distribution and specificity dictate the overall cellulosome architecture (3). The cellulosome system in Clos