microorganisms Article Comparative Genomic Analysis of Three Pseudomonas Species Isolated from the Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea virginica) Tissues, Mantle Fluid, and the Overlying Estuarine Water Column Ashish Pathak 1, Paul Stothard 2 and Ashvini Chauhan 1,* 1 Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory, School of the Environment, 1515 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Suite 305B, FSH Science Research Center, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, FL 32307, USA;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +1-850-412-5119; Fax: +1-850-561-2248 Abstract: The eastern oysters serve as important keystone species in the United States, especially in the Gulf of Mexico estuarine waters, and at the same time, provide unparalleled economic, ecological, environmental, and cultural services. One ecosystem service that has garnered recent attention is the ability of oysters to sequester impurities and nutrients, such as nitrogen (N), from the estuarine water that feeds them, via their exceptional filtration mechanism coupled with microbially-mediated denitrification processes. It is the oyster-associated microbiomes that essentially provide these myriads of ecological functions, yet not much is known on these microbiota at the genomic scale, especially from warm temperate and tropical water habitats. Among the suite of bacterial genera that appear to interplay with the oyster host species, pseudomonads deserve further assessment because Citation: Pathak, A.; Stothard, P.; of their immense metabolic and ecological potential. To obtain a comprehensive understanding on Chauhan, A. Comparative Genomic this aspect, we previously reported on the isolation and preliminary genomic characterization of Analysis of Three Pseudomonas Species three Pseudomonas species isolated from minced oyster tissue (P.