Alicyclobacillus hesperidum strain URH17-3-68 was initially isolated from hot spring sludge in Tengchong, Yunnan province, China. It is a thermoacidophilic, aerobic, Gram-positive bacterium, and it grows optimally at 50 to 55°C and pH 3.5 to 4. In 2000, Albuquerque et al. reported the isolation of Alicyclobacillus hesperidum from the solfataric soils at Furnas on the Island of S？o Miguel in the Azores, but there has been no further research (including genome sequencing) on this strain.

Prof. CHEN Zugen's group at Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences have found that extracellular products of URH17-3-68 have thermoacidophilic enzyme activities of amylase, cellulose, etc., rendering it a potential strain for further industrial production. To facilitate understanding of the genome and cloning of important genes, we sequenced strain URH17-3-68 using the Illumina HiSeq 2000. Paired-end sequencing libraries with insert sizes of ～200 bp and ～300 bp were constructed using the protocol recommended by Illumina.

The sequencing was performed with 2 × 75-bp reads to generate 494.93 Mb of filtered sequences. The genome sequence was assembled using the Velvet de novo assembler (v1.2.03) with a k-mer length of 57. The size of the draft genome is ～3 Mb, representing ～165-fold coverage. It contains 78 large contigs (>500 bp); N50 is 128,978 bp, and N90 is 33,233 bp, with a G+C content of 54%. The draft genome annotations predict 71 tRNA sequences, 7 rRNA sequences, and 2,922 protein-coding genes using tRNAscan-SE, RNAmmer, and Glimmer3.0. Analysis of gene function was carried out by BLAST.

Many important industrial enzyme genes were identified, such as alpha-amylase, alpha-glucosidase, protease, and phospholipase D. Based on 16S rRNA and protein similarity, Alicyclobacillus hesperidum strain URH17-3-68 is closely related to Alicyclobacillus acidocaldarius subsp. acidocaldarius DSM 446. In summary, these observations, combined with further comparative genome analysis, may contribute to abundant resources for industrial enzyme production.

The paper entitled "Draft Genome Sequence of Alicyclobacillus hesperidum Strain URH17-3-68" has been published in the Journal of Bacteriology. Research associate WANG Ping and LI Li are co-first authors of this paper. Dr. CHEN Zugen and Dr. SONG Hui are co-corresponding authors. This research was supported by grants from the National Key Basic Research Program (973 Program) of China (2011CB710802), the Knowledge Innovation Key Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-EW-G-8), and the Tianjin Science and Technology Support Program (10ZCKFSY05500).