Adriel Latorre-Pérez is a biotechnologist at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and bioinformatician at the University of Valencia, with a special interest in third generation sequencing and metagenomics. Adriel is also a Ph.D. student at Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence, where he has been working with nanopore data since 2017. His main research objectives are to evaluate the suitability of Oxford Nanopore technology for different metagenomic approaches, and to apply this technology for studying environments of industrial or biotechnological interest.

Long-read sequencing is rapidly changing the field of metagenomics. In recent years, nanopore sequencing has been successfully applied to characterize microbial communities from multiple environments, leading to the recovery of nearly- or fully-complete genomes directly from metagenomes. In this presentation, I will introduce our evaluation of the most widely used long-read assemblers. We analyzed data generated from six different mock communities sequenced with the Oxford Nanopore platform, and we compared the results in terms of completeness, contiguity, and accuracy. The importance of polishing the draft assemblies was also assessed. Overall, nanopore metagenomic sequencing data proved sufficient for characterizing low-complexity microbial communities.

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