kocuria rhizophila is a gram - positive , coccoid , and spherical bacterium belonging to the family micrococcaceae in the phylum actinobacteria , and was designated as a new species by kovcs and coworkers 1 . members of the genus kocuria have been isolated from a wide variety of natural sources , and k. rhizophila in particular , was found to have important industrial applications . k. rhizophila has been utilised as the standard quality control strain for antimicrobial susceptibility testing 2 and also as a decolorizing agent of industrial dyes 3 . our strain was isolated from sungai gabai , selangor , malaysia and analysis of the genome revealed the presence of an aromatic compound degradation pathway . initially , the genomic dna of k. rhizophila tpw45 was extracted using masterpure complete dna and rna purification kit ( epicentre , inc . , madison , wi , usa ) according to the manufacturer 's recommended protocol . subsequently , the quality of dna was examined using the nanodrop 2000 spectrophotometer ( thermo scientific ) and quantified using qubit 2.0 fluorometer ( life technologies ) . for whole - genome sequencing of k. rhizophila tpw45 , the library was prepared using illumina nextera dna sample preparation kit as per manufacturer 's guidelines . the sequencing of this strain was then performed on the illumina hiseq 2500 ( illumina , inc . , ca ) using a paired - end library with an average insert size of 702 bp , obtaining 3,407,419 raw reads of 100 bp in length . after trimming , de novo assembly of the genome was performed using clc genomics workbench 7.0 4 while the genome annotation was performed using rapid annotation using subsystem technology ( rast ) 5 . the assembled genome consists of 2,701,701 bases across 46 contigs with an n50 contig length of 114,097 bases . the average genome coverage was found to be 202.76. the assembled genome was found to have a g + c content of 70.6% , falling within the range of known k. rhizophila genomes ( table 1 ) . there were 2,349 predicted coding dna sequences ( cds ) , whereas a total of 50 trnas were predicted using trnascan - se 6 , and 4 rrnas was identified by using rnammer 7 . this draft genome revealed a putative gene cluster involved in aromatic compound degradation that encodes a phenylacetatic acid ( paa ) pathway . this paa gene cluster was found in contig 17 of our strain and the gene arrangement was found to be similar to that of k. rhizophila strain dc2201 , which is a closely related strain ( figure 1 ) . phenylacetate or phenylacetyl - coenzyme a ( coa ) can be found as a derivative product from many substrates namely phenylalanine , 2-phenylethylamine , some phenylalkanoic acids , and also pollutants such as styrene and ethylbenzene . 8 the paa pathway proceeds via phenylacetyl - coa and ring fission is hydrolysed via a multicomponent oxygenase encoded by paaghijk . 9 in summary , phenylacetate degradation has been more widely studied in proteobacteria such as escherichia spp . and pseudomonas spp . 8 we hope that this genome sequence of strain tpw45 will provide more insight into the phenylacetate degradation pathway by k. rhizophila . further analysis of this genome and supporting experimental evidence will be needed to support this prediction and further understand the process of aromatic compound degradation by bacteria via paa catabolism . the whole genome shotgun project has been deposited in ddbj / embl / genbank under accession number jwtc00000000.1 .
kocuria rhizophila is a ubiquitous bacterium which is well known for its industrial value . here , we present the draft genome of kocuria rhizophila strain tpw45 which was isolated from sungai gabai , selangor , malaysia . the assembled genome comprised of 46 contigs and 
 the estimated genome size is 2.7 mb . 
 based on the rast annotation , a gene cluster responsible for aromatic compound degradation was identified in this strain .