Glimpse into the Genomes of Rice Endophytic Bacteria: Diversity and Distribution of Firmicutes

Endophytic bacteria inhabit within plant tissues without causing any evident damage to the host and play crucial roles in plant growth, development, fitness, and protection (Farrar et al., 2014; Truyens et al., 2015). These endophytic bacteria spend a portion of their life cycle inside plants and normally resides on intercellular spaces and gain carbohydrates, amino acids, and inorganic nutrients from plants (Bacon andHinton, 2007). Despite their beneficial effects on plant growth and development, seed-borne endophytic bacteria are still largely unexplored. Recent developments in high-throughput technologies, such as next-generation sequencing (NGS), permit the investigation of endophytic microbiomes, facilitate sequencing of a larger number of bacteria and encourage in depth analyses of bacterial communities from taxonomy, phylogeny, and evolutionary studies (Kaul et al., 2016). Genomes of endophytic bacteria encode all the information that is required for an organism to grow under a range of both favorable and unfavorable conditions depending on the plant habitats. Along with the house-keeping machinery, these bacterial genomes also encode genes that are required for their endophytic life style and plant beneficial properties (Hardoim et al., 2015; Sheibani-Tezerji et al., 2015). In the present study, whole genome sequencing of 21 rice seed endophytic bacterial species belonging to the phylum Firmicutes was performed to ascertain their phylogenetic position and to get clue of the genomic signatures for their adaptation to endophytic lifestyle. Genomic dataset of endophytic bacterial strains are valuable pool of information that provides insights into the diversity, distribution, and lifestyle associated genes of these endophytes associated with plants.