Draft Genome Resource of a Wolbachia Endosymbiont in Heterodera humuli

Abstract

The bacterial endosymbiont, Wolbachia is known to be associated with different arthropods and only two genera of plant-parasitic nematodes, Pratylenchus and Radopholus. This effort employed a genome skimming approach to discover the presence of endosymbionts in a population of Heterodera humuli sequenced with PacBio long-read sequencing. Wolbachia was found associated with the nematode. The genome of this Wolbachia is 1,051,007 bp and has a GC% (32.6%) within the expected range for the genus. A phylogenetic analysis placed the Wolbachia strain from H. humuli in a clade with another nematode-associated Wolbachia strain reported in Texas, with a bootstrap value of 1. To our knowledge, this is the first published report of Wolbachia associated with H. humuli, expanding the known association of this endosymbiont to three genera of plant-parasitic nematodes. This finding will enhance sequence resources for further comparisons of Wolbachia diversity.