C. pseudotuberculosis bv. equi is a facultative intracellular, beta-hemolytic, pleomorphic (Fig. 1), non-sporulating, unencapsulated, non-mobile, facultative anaerobic, Gram-positive pathogen.. The main characteristics of the species are shown in Table 1. C. pseudotuberculosis is taxonomically classified in the phylum Actinobacteria, class Actinobacteria, order Corynebacteriales, family Corynebacteriaceae, and genus Corynebacteria. The strains included in this study were isolated from horses in the state of California, USA. The animals had distinct signs and symptoms of infection. Strain MB11 was isolated from a 6-month-old American Paint horse with ulcerative lymphangitis. Strain MB14 was isolated from an Arab/Saddle horse with abscess formation in internal organs (liver and kidney). The animal also presented hepatic lipidosis and myocardial fibroses. Strain MB30 was isolated from the pectoral abscess of a 2-year-old Quarter horse. Finally, strain MB66 was isolated from a 20-year-old Polish Arab mare with metastatic melanoma and multiple external and internal abscesses. These distinct signs, such as pectoral abscesses ("pigeon fever"), abscesses on the internal organs, or abscesses on the limbs (ulcerative lymphangitis), suggest that the equi biovar can interact in several ways with the host animal to cause infection. All strains were isolated over the period of October-1996 up to June-2002.  
A dendrogram was calculated with the Neighbor-joining statistical method using a bootstrap analysis with 1000 replicates. The rpoB gene, which codes for the beta subunit of the RNA polymerase enzyme, was used as a marker when constructing the dendrogram. The analysis was performed using the NCBI reference sequence for the species, retrieving from the database at least one representative from each genus in the Corynebacterium, Mycobacterium, Nocardia , and Rhodococcus group (Fig. 2). This group is composed of species that share cellular characteristics, such as a cell wall composed of peptidoglycan, arabinogalactan, and mycolic acids, as well as a genome with a high GC content. The first phylogenetic studies on the CMNR group used the 16S rRNA gene as a marker. These studies demonstrated that the genera in the family Corynebacteriaceae form a monophyletic clade composed of four groups, in which C. pseudotuberculosis is phylogenetically closest to the species C. ulcerans and C. diphtheriae. Recently, Khamis et al. proposed that the gene rpoB could be used as a marker to identify clinical isolates of the genus Corynebacterium. The positive results for identification using the rpoB gene were greater than those of the 16S rRNA gene, indicating that rpoB is useful for taxonomic classification the family Corynebacteriaceae. The dendrogram in Fig. 2 shows the phylogenetic proximity between the sequenced biovars of the species C. pseudotuberculosis. In addition, it corroborates the analyses performed with the 16S rRNA gene, which designated C. diphtheriae as the species most closely related to C. pseudotuberculosis. The results show that each genus in the CMNR group is divided into clades supported by high bootstrap values. 
The four C. pseudotuberculosis genomes in this short report are part of a collaboration between the University of California, Davis, USA, and the Federal Universities of Minas Gerais and Para, Brazil. The project seeks to determine the genomic characteristics of 12 strains of the equi biovar isolated from horses in California showing distinct signs and symptoms of infection. Isolation was performed over several years from different horse breeds (Table 2). One of the major aims of the project is to determine if a relationship exists between the genetic content of the strains and the type of infection that it causes (i.e., ulcerative lymphangitis, external abscesses, or internal abscesses). In parallel, the project seeks to increase the amount of genomic data for the species C. pseudotuberculosis in databases, which will form the basis for broader functional studies. The genomes obtained in this study have been deposited into the NCBI database under accession number CP013260, CP013261, CP013262, CP013263. The project information is also presented in Table 2. 
After isolation, the bacteria were maintained in 25% glycerol at -80  C, and the medium was refreshed routinely. To extract genomic DNA, the bacteria were first cultured in liquid brain heart infusion (BHI) medium at 37  C with shaking. DNA was extracted during the log-phase of cell growth according to the protocol described by Pacheco et al. for clinical isolates. The extracted DNA was subjected to electrophoresis on a 1% agarose gel to determine the quality of the material.
Genomic DNA was sequenced on the Ion Torrent PGM (Thermo Scientific) platform using the 318 chip v2 in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions. The quality of the reads was analyzed using FastQC software. The reads were then trimmed and filtered to remove those with a phred-scaled quality score less than 20. Next, the reads were assembled using Mira 4 software. Redundancy within the assembled contigs was eliminated using the SeqMan Pro tool in the Lasergene software package (DNASTAR). The few remaining gaps after redundancy removal were manually closed using local BLAST or a program developed by our research group called GapBlaster, which uses a reference genome to assemble similar sequences to close the gap using the sequencing reads. For this analysis, we used C. pseudotuberculosis biovar equi strain 316 as a reference. An optical map using KpnI restriction sites was generated to evaluate the quality of the genome assembly for the MB11 strain (Fig. 3). The optical map was analyzed using MapSolver v.3.2.0 (OpGen). Figure 3 shows that the in silico assembly for strain MB11 was very satisfactory; the positions of the restriction sites were corroborated by the optical map analysis. 
An automatic annotation was first conducted using the online software Pannotator, which provided the .fasta files for the assembled genomes and a reference .embl file for C. pseudotuberculosis 316. The results were then manually curated to meet the gene annotation standards set by UniProt using Artemis software to visualize the coding sequences. Next, pseudogenes were also manually curated to resolve mismatches using CLC Genomics Workbench 5 (CLC Bio) and Artemis. Predicted genes for the four genomes were classified by the clusters of orthologous groups functional category, as shown in Table 3. 
All of the genomes were completely closed, resulting in a size of 2,363,423 bp for strain MB11, 2,370,761 bp for MB14, 2,364,377 for MB30, and 2,372,202 bp for MB66. The approximately 2.3 Mbp size is similar to other previously studied and published equi strains. Four ribosomal RNA clusters were observed in all of the genomes. The strains had an average GC content of 52% and a total of 51 tRNAs predicted by tRNAscan-SE for each strain. MB11 had a total of 2179 CDSs and 37 pseudogenes after manual curation. MB14 had 2235 CDSs and 20 pseudogenes, while MB30 had 2225 CDSs and six pseudogenes, and finally, MB66 had 2201 CDSs and 54 pseudogenes. A more detailed description of the genomic statistics is presented in Table 4. 
A circular map was generated using the CGView web tool that shows the relationship of the predicted proteins in the MB14, MB30, and MB66 genomes compared to strain MB11, in which the in silico assembly was corroborated by the optical map (Fig. 4). All of the genomes had similar sizes and a similar number of CDSs, with few differences between the coding regions of the genomes. Structural analyses were conducted by comparing the four genomes with a local database using blastn, and the results were analyzed using the Artemis Comparison Tool. The MB11 and MB14 strains showed extensive structural similarity, while MB30 had a large inversion of approximately 1.2 Mbp compared to MB14 (Fig. 5). However, MB66 had the largest number of structural rearrangements (Fig. 5). It is worth noting that two strains with distinct infection phenotypes (MB11 and MB14) that were isolated eight years apart had largely similar genomic structures, which did not occur in the other analyzed strains.