The complete sequencing of the strain, Marinobacter hydrocarbonoclasticus, which belongs to a marine genus and which is ubiquitous in the marine environment, will make it possible to study the genes implicated in the nitrogen cycle, in energy production (aerobic and anaerobic), in degradation of labile and recalcitrant (hydrocarbon) carbon sources, in the formation of biofilms and in resistance to osmotic pressure. This study is expected to provide a major advance in the knowledge of fundamental metabolism in a ubiquitous marine micro-organism.

With this objective, Genethon is undertaking global random shotgun sequencing of the genome of the Marinobacter hydrocarbonoclasticus strain ATCC 49840 using three libraries of sub-clones : a plasmid library of aabout 15,000 clones in the multicopy vector pcdna2.1 (3 kb inserts), a plasmid library of about 5,000 clones in the low copy-number vector pCNS (10 kb inserts) and a mini-BAC library of about 2,500 clones in the PBeloBAC11 vector (25 kb inserts).