Genome Sequence of the Verrucomicrobium Opitutus terrae PB90-1,

Bacteria of the deeply branching phylum Verrucomicrobia are rarely cultured yet commonly detected in metagenomic libraries from aquatic, terrestrial, and intestinal environments. We have sequenced the genome of Opitutus terrae PB90-1, a fermentative anaerobe within this phylum, isolated from rice paddy soil and capable of propionate production from plant-derived polysaccharides. The Verrucomicrobia comprise an excellent example of a bacterial phylum that is hardly detected by conventional culti-vation-based approaches. However, these bacteria are fre-quently encountered in 16S rRNA gene libraries from a wide variety of ecosystems, including aquatic and terrestrial envi-ronments (20), as well as the mammalian gastrointestinal tract (5, 19). During the past 5 years, improved cultivation tech-niques have resulted in the isolation of a range of members of this phylum (8). This resulted in the observation that different lineages of the Verrucomicrobia have a compartmentalized cell organization, similar to that of the Planctomycetes (14, 15)