Soil Collected from a Single Great Smoky Mountains Trail Contains a Diversity of Listeria monocytogenes and spp.

Listeria monocytogenes, a foodborne pathogen, and other spp. are present in natural environments. Isolating and characterizing strains from natural reservoirs can provide insight into the prevalence and diversity of spp.

Phenotypic characterization and analysis of complete genomes of two distinct strains of the proposed species "L. swaminathanii".

Recently, a new Listeria species, "Listeria swaminathanii", was proposed. Here, we phenotypically and genotypically characterize two additional strains that were previously obtained from soil samples and compare the results to the type strain. Complete genomes for both strains were assembled from hybrid Illumina and Nanopore sequencing reads and annotated.