Genome Sequence of Aspergillus aculeatinus IC_8, Isolated from an Indoor Air Sample of an Urban Housing Complex in Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Aspergillus aculeatinus is an industrially important species of Aspergillus section Nigri capable of producing bioactive, antibiotic, and antitumor compounds. We sequenced the genome of a strain of A. aculeatinus that was isolated from the interior of a housing complex in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

A spergillus section Nigri (the black aspergilli) consists of species that cause food spoilage, cause plant disease, and produce industrially relevant compounds like lipases, amylase, citric acid, and gluconic acid (1). Aspergillus aculeatinus is a member of the black aspergilli and closely related to Aspergillus aculeatus (2). A. aculeatinus has the potential for industrial application, as it produces the bioactive compound neoxaline, the antifungal compound aculeacin, and the antitumor compound paclitaxel (originally named Taxol [Bristol-Myers Squibb]) (2,3). To date, only one A. aculeatinus genome has been sequenced (4).
To provide additional genomic resources for A. aculeatinus, we sequenced the genome of A. aculeatinus IC_8 after isolating it from an indoor air sample of a 23story urban housing complex in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, that houses ;2,000 residents. Specifically, petri dishes with Sabouraud chloramphenicol agar were left open for 24 hours and then incubated at 25°C for 3 days. We used the hyphal tipping approach followed by incubation and single spore isolation to retrieve pure culture. DNA extraction was carried out as previously described (5). Briefly, spores were plated onto potato dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 37°C for 96 hours. Spores were collected and directly used for DNA extraction using the MasterPure yeast DNA purification kit following the manufacturer's instructions, with several minor modifications.
The assembly consisted of 441 scaffolds, a cumulative assembly size of 36.47 Mb (nearly identical to that of the A. aculeatinus CBS 121060 genome [4]), an N 50 value of 649,318 bp, and a GC content of 50.48%. Genome completeness was evaluated with BUSCO v3.1.0 using the "ascomycota_odb9" gene set (9). A total of 98.9% of BUSCO genes were recovered from the IC_8 genome, indicating a high-quality genome assembly.
To verify the species of IC_8, we conducted a phylogenetic analysis of IC_8 and 24 genomes from 22 Aspergillus section Nigri species, including A. aculeatinus CBS 121060 (4). For all genomes, we used the Funannotate v1.7.0 (10) pipeline to predict gene models. Next, we used Orthofinder v2.3.3 to identify orthologous genes across the 25 genomes (11). A concatenated amino acid sequence alignment was generated from 4,680 translated genes. FastTree v2.1.10 was used to infer the phylogenetic relationship of isolates from the concatenated sequence alignment, using the MLACC = 3 and nearest-neighbor interchange (NNI) options, with 100 bootstraps (12,13). IC_8 is monophyletic with A. aculeatinus CBS 121060, and both taxa have short branch lengths (Fig. 1), providing clear evidence that the species identity of IC_8 is A. aculeatinus.
Data availability. The whole-genome shotgun project for A. aculeatinus IC_8 has been deposited in GenBank under the accession number JADPID000000000. Raw Illumina data have been deposited to the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under the BioProject accession number PRJNA675076.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R21AI137485).