NCTC-ATCC_congeneq
The National Collection of Type Cultures is one of the oldest repositories of bacteria still in existence, comprising approximately 6,000 bacterial strains. Recently, a collaboration between the NCTC, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Pacific Biosciences established the NCTC3000 project (PRJEB6403), leading to long sequence reads, genome assemblies and annotations of approximately half of the NCTC strains. We took advantage of the ensuing genomic data to conduct a modest comparison of 13 selected control and reference strains with their equivalent strains within the American Type Culture Collection. We found that despite differing strain management processes and personnel, and potentially decades of time for genetic drift via strain passage, the genome pairs showed a remarkable level of concordance. This BioProject contains Illumina sequencing reads for the 13 NCTC strains, those for their equivalent 13 ATCC strains and PacBio genome assemblies for the 13 NCTC strains (from the NCTC3000 project) polished with the Illumina reads.