Isolation and genomic characterization of metal-resistant Stenotrophomonas maltophilia SRM01 from the marine environment

Abstract Stenotrophomonas maltophilia is an emerging global opportunistic pathogen that has been intensively studied for its antibiotic resistance and capacity to cause nosocomial and community-acquired infections. Interestingly, S. maltophilia has already been discovered to tolerate a high concentration of cadmium, selenium, and tellurium. This study showed that this bacterium could survive high doses of heavy metals in various heavy metal salt-containing nutritional media: CdCl2 up to 1 mM, Pb (NO3)2 up to 10 mM, FeSO4 up to 10 mM, CuSO4 and ZnCl2 up to 5 mM. Intriguingly, the genomic investigation performed within this study identified the probable genes involved in metal resistance. The genomic data were mapped to uncover possible metal resistance mechanisms in S. maltophilia. The entire genome length of strain SRM01 is 4,968,240 bp, with a GC content of 66%, according to the annotation processes. There were 1659 coding sequences attributed to putative proteins and 4621 coding sequences attributed to recognized functions. Various metal resistance mechanisms which encode gene clusters such as czc, cop, cus, and zur and are critical for the bacteria’s survival in hostile environments were discovered in the S. maltophilia SRM01 strain. Genomic island prediction and phylogenetic tree analysis of the genome and targeted metal resistant genes revealed that metal resistant genes could be transferred by horizontal gene transfer across the species of S. maltophilia.