High intra-laboratory reproducibility of nanopore sequencing in bacterial species underscores advances in its accuracy
This research, conducted by Abdel-Glil et al., highlights the advances in Oxford Nanopore Technologies, including higher sequencing accuracy, removing the need for short-read data. Across five bacterial strains and eight replicates, the team achieved an average reproducibility accuracy of 99.9% for Oxford Nanopore-only assemblies — closely matching short-read-polished assemblies.
Key points:
The aim of this study was to evaluate the reproducibility of nanopore sequencing under uniform conditions using a benchmark dataset of five bacterial species
To assemble Oxford Nanopore sequencing data, the team used an open-source workflow, nanobacta
Resistance gene detection, MLST typing, taxonomic classification, plasmid recovery, and genome completeness were all highly reproducible using Oxford Nanopore-only data
Oxford Nanopore-only assemblies averaged 2.2 variant errors per genome, and short-read polishing only improved accuracy by 0.00005%, supporting the case for nanopore-only assemblies
‘Our results show high reproducibility of [Oxford] Nanopore sequencing results in various genomic analyses, highlighting improvements in the accuracy of [Oxford] Nanopore sequencing’
Mostafa Y. Abdel-Glil et al.
Sample type: bacteria