Draft Genome Sequences of Two Xanthomonas vesicatoria Strains from the Balkan Peninsula

Xanthomonas vesicatoria causes bacterial spot disease of pepper and tomato plants. We report here the first genome sequences of X. vesicatoria strains that have been isolated from pepper plants. These data will be used for comparative genomics and will allow the development of new detection and typing tools for epidemiological surveillance.

spot disease on pepper and tomato plants (1). The disease symptoms include chlorotic and necrotic lesions on leaves, stems, petioles, fruits, and flowers, as well as defoliation. Bacterial spot disease is present worldwide where environmental conditions are suitable for the pathogen. The disease is one of the economically most important plant diseases on the Balkan Peninsula (2, 3), with annual losses reaching 10 to 20% (4). Bacterial spots of tomato were first recorded in Bulgaria in 1936 (5). Later, the disease was also reported on pepper plants in Bulgaria (6). The first report of bacterial spot disease in Macedonia dates back to 1999 (3). Current control of the disease is mainly based on agricultural practices and the use of copper compounds. In order to develop new molecular markers for epidemiological surveillance, such as variablenumber tandem repeats (VNTR) (7), we sequenced the genomes of two strains from the Balkan Peninsula.
Combined with the draft genome sequence of the New Zealand strain X. vesicatoria ATCC 35937, which was isolated from Lycop-ersicon lycopersicum (11), these genomic resources will aid in the development of new diagnostic tools, such as multilocus VNTR analyses (MLVA), which have been proven to be powerful tools for studying bacterial phytopathogen populations (12)(13)(14)(15). In addition, these genome sequences may give new insight into the pathogen-host interaction. For instance, a comparison of the predicted repertoires of type III effectors with the effector repertoire of the tomato isolate X. vesicatoria ATCC 35937 revealed that both pepper isolates appear to lack xopD, xopE2, and xopJ2. Contrariwise, the pepper isolates possess homologs of avrBs1 and xopH, which were not found in strain ATCC 35937. Both genes are in tandem arrangement and might be located on a plasmid, as in Xanthomonas euvesicatoria strain 85-10 (16). More sequencing and pathotyping are required to assess the importance of these effectors with respect to the host plants.
Nucleotide sequence accession numbers. These wholegenome shotgun projects have been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/ GenBank under the accession numbers JSXZ00000000 (strain 15b) and JSYJ00000000 (strain 53M). The versions described in this paper are the first versions, JSXZ01000000 and JSYJ01000000.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by grant BG051PO001-3.3.05-000, financed by Operational Program "Human resources development" and cofinanced by the European Social Fund of the European Union.
T.V. thanks the European Union Erasmusϩ Program for support.