Burkholderia

Burkholderia is a genus of Proteobacteria. It's pathogenic members include:

• Burkholderia cenocepacia (formerly Burkholderia cepacia genomovar III, and before that Pseudomonas cepacia), a Gram negative bacterium which is ubiquitous in the environment and may cause a number of diseases in plants. Human infection can be caused by B. cepacia, especially in patients with cystic fibrosis and chronic granulomatous disease, and is often fatal.

• Burkholderia pseudomallei (previously called Pseudomonas pseudomallei), the causative agent of melioidosis, a serious disease of man and animals that occurs primarily in S.E. Asia, N. Australia and other tropical areas. B. pseudomallei is an environmental Gram-negative saprophyte present in wet soil and rice paddies in endemic areas. The highest documented infection rate is in northeastern Thailand, where melioidosis accounts for 20% of all community-acquired septicaemias. Disease occurs after bacterial contamination of breaks in the skin or by inhalation after contact with water or soil. There is no licensed vaccine against meliodosis, and the bacterium is resistant to many antibiotics. B. pseudomallei strain K96243 is a clinical isolate from Thailand, supplied by Dr. S. Songsivilai of Mahidol University.

Data Downloads

• B. cenocepacia BLAST server

• B. cenocepacia FTP site

• B. pseudomallei BLAST server

• B. pseudomallei FTP site

Burkholderia cenocepacia

The Sanger Institute has completed the sequencing of and published the 8.06 Mb genome of Burkholderia cenocepacia strain J2315, in collaboration with Dr. Eshwar Mahenthiralingham of the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, Prof. John Govan of the Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Edinburgh, Prof. C.A. Hart of the Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Liverpool, and Prof. Peter Vandamme of the Laboratorium voor Microbiologie, Universiteit Gent, Belgium.

Note that B. cenocepacia J2315 has recently been renamed from B. cepacia J2315.

The sequenced strain, J2315, is a genomovar III strain of the ET12 lineage, and is the index strain for transmission of this strain among CF patients in the UK. Strain J2315 has been deposited as LMG 16656 in the Belgium Coordinated Collection of Microorganisms.

The sequence and annotation of the Burkholderia cenocepacia strain J2315 genome have been deposited in the EMBL database under accession numbers AM747720, AM747721, AM747722 and AM747723

Shotgun and assembly data from this project are available from our FTP site.

Burkholderia pseudomallei

The Sanger Institute has published the 7.2 Mb genome of Burkholderia pseudomallei in collaboration with Dr. Rick Titball of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Porton Down, and Dr. Ty Pitt of the Heath Protection Agency. We have sequenced strain K96243, a clinical isolate from Thailand, supplied by Dr. S. Songsivilai of Mahidol University. This project is funded by Beowulf Genomics.

The reference genome is 7,247,547 bp in size with a G+C content of 68.06% consisting of two chromosomes of 4,074,542 bp and 3,173,005 bp. The sequence is available for download by FTP and can be searched using our BLAST server.

The two fully annotated chromosomal sequences are deposited in the EMBL/GenBank databases with accession numbers BX571965 and BX571966.

Shotgun and assembly data from this project are available from our FTP site.