Draft Genome Sequence of Terrestrial Streptomyces sp. Strain VITNK9, Isolated from Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India, Exhibiting Antagonistic Activity against Fish Pathogens

We report the draft genome sequence of Streptomyces sp. strain VITNK9, isolated from a soil sample collected in Vellore district (12.9165°N, 79.1325°E), Tamil Nadu, India, with an assembly size of 7,920,076 bp and 72.7% GC content.

S treptomyces spp. have been considered one of the most prolific sources of pharmacologically active compounds for decades, contributing approximately 60% of antibiotics which are in clinical use today. To discover natural products possessing antagonistic activity against fish pathogens, we isolated a new actinomycete strain, Streptomyces sp. strain VITNK9, from a terrestrial soil sample from Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India, using actinomycete isolation agar (AIA) plates (1,2). The strain had a smooth colony surface, an earthy odor, and a spiral spore formation, including aerial mycelia and substrate hyphae penetrating through agar, morphologies typical of Streptomycetes. The crude extract of the strain exhibited antimicrobial activity against several fish pathogens, implying that this strain can be an important resource of bioactive metabolites (1). Further, to obtain the genomic potential of VITNK9 to synthesize bioactive compounds, its genome was sequenced.
Genome assembly of VITNK9 yielded 18 scaffolds with an N 50 value of 1,271,901 bp and with the largest contig being 1,996,233 bp. The genome consists of 7,919,889 bp without ambiguous nucleotides (N) with a GC content of 72.7%, 100% estimated completeness, 0.06% contamination, and 0% heterogeneity. The VITNK9 genome contains 7,148 predicted and 73 RNA genes (68 tRNA genes). Based on EzTaxon analyses of the extracted 16S rRNA gene (876 bp) from VITNK9, the strain showed 84.11% similarity to Streptomyces rochei strain NRRL B-2410 T .
Overall, Streptomyces sp. strain VITNK9 possesses a high potential for diverse and bioactive secondary metabolites and can further be considered an important strain to study for bioactive compounds and their biosynthesis in the future.
Data availability. The genome of the Streptomyces sp. strain VITNK9 has been deposited at GenBank under accession number no. JACWAA000000000, assembly accession no. ASM1485402v1, BioProject no. PRJNA661553, and BioSample no. SAMN16063085. The raw reads are available under accession no. SRR12997718 in the Sequence Read Archive (SRA).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We sincerely thank the management of the Vellore Institute of Technology for providing the necessary facilities to carry out this research work.
This study was also supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic MSCA IF II project (CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/18_070/0010493), a Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TA CR)-National Centre of Competence grant (no. TN010000048/03), and Czech Science Foundation (GA CR) project no. 19-17868Y.