Complete Genome Sequences of Three Leptospira mayottensis Strains from Tenrecs That Are Endemic in the Malagasy Region

Leptospirosis is a zoonosis caused by Leptospira, a diversified genus containing more than 10 pathogenic species. Tenrecs are small terrestrial mammals endemic in the Malagasy region and are known to be reservoirs of the recently described species Leptospira mayottensis.

L eptospirosis is an environmental infectious disease caused by spirochetal bacteria belonging to the genus Leptospira. Humans usually get infected during recreational or work-related outdoor activities through contact with urine excreted by animal reservoirs. This zoonosis is estimated to cause more than one million human cases and 58,900 deaths each year (1). Disease incidence is highest on tropical islands, notably in the southwestern Indian Ocean, where investigations carried out under a One Health framework have revealed distinct transmission chains in the different islands (2)(3)(4)(5), including the occurrence of Leptospira mayottensis, a pathogenic Leptospira species recently recognized as new to science (6). Representatives of L. mayottensis (formerly known as Leptospira borgpetersenii group B) were originally isolated from human acute cases (7) and later identified in tenrecs (2,5,8), a diversified family of mammals endemic to Madagascar (9,10).
Overall, genome sizes and structures (see Table 1) are close to those of previously published ones, with comparably low (Յ40%) GC contents, two chromosomes, and, in the case of T. ecaudatus-borne strains, an additional plasmid (12).
Automatic annotation was performed with the NCBI Prokaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline (13), which revealed that the VS2413, MDI272, and MDI222 genomes are composed of 3,893, 3,917, and 4,136 coding sequences, respectively.
Human leptospirosis on Mayotte is peculiar because it is associated with four distinct bacterial species, including L. mayottensis (14), and characterized by a relatively low fatality rate (0.9%) (15). The epidemiology is clearly distinct in the neighboring Seychelles and on Reunion Island, where L. interrogans is overwhelmingly dominant and fatality rates are higher (11.8% in the Seychelles and 3 to 5% on Reunion Island) (3, 4, 16). An attenuated virulence of Leptospira species prevailing on Mayotte, including L. mayottensis, may be at least in part responsible for this contrasted regional epidemiology. The genomes presented herein will accelerate comparative genomic approaches aimed at delineating the main genomic features involved in Leptospira virulence.
Data availability. Genome sequences were deposited in DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession numbers CP030142 and CP030143, CP030144 to CP030146, and CP030147 to CP030149 for strains VS2413, MDI222, and MDI272, respectively, as well as BioProject number PRJNA477299. Raw sequence data are available from the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (accession number SRP154442).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are thankful to Pierre Lefeuvre, Frédéric Pagès, and Claire Valiente-Moro for fruitful discussions.
This work was financed by European Regional Development Funds ERDF PO INTERREG V ECOSPIR number RE6875 and was carried out in the framework of Colette Cordonin's Ph.D. degree, financed by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. We thank members of the IRD i-trop Plantes Santé bioinformatics platform for providing HPC resources and support. a All but one replicon were successfully circularized.