scholarly journals Long metabarcoding of the eukaryotic rDNA operon to phylogenetically and taxonomically resolve environmental diversity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahwash Jamy ◽  
Rachel Foster ◽  
Pierre Barbera ◽  
Lucas Czech ◽  
Alexey Kozlov ◽  
...  

AbstractHigh-throughput environmental DNA metabarcoding has revolutionized the analysis of microbial diversity, but this approach is generally restricted to amplicon sizes below 500 base pairs. These short regions contain limited phylogenetic signal, which makes it impractical to use environmental DNA in full phylogenetic inferences. However, new long-read sequencing technologies such as the Pacific Biosciences platform may provide sufficiently large sequence lengths to overcome the poor phylogenetic resolution of short amplicons. To test this idea, we amplified soil DNA and used PacBio Circular Consensus Sequencing (CCS) to obtain a ~4500 bp region of the eukaryotic rDNA operon spanning most of the small (18S) and large subunit (28S) ribosomal RNA genes. The CCS reads were first treated with a novel curation workflow that generated 650 high-quality OTUs containing the physically linked 18S and 28S regions of the long amplicons. In order to assign taxonomy to these OTUs, we developed a phylogeny-aware approach based on the 18S region that showed greater accuracy and sensitivity than similarity-based and phylogenetic placement-based methods using shorter reads. The taxonomically-annotated OTUs were then combined with available 18S and 28S reference sequences to infer a well-resolved phylogeny spanning all major groups of eukaryotes, allowing to accurately derive the evolutionary origin of environmental diversity. A total of 1019 sequences were included, of which a majority (58%) corresponded to the new long environmental CCS reads. Comparisons to the 18S-only region of our amplicons revealed that the combined 18S-28S genes globally increased the phylogenetic resolution, recovering specific groupings otherwise missing. The long-reads also allowed to directly investigate the relationships among environmental sequences themselves, which represents a key advantage over the placement of short reads on a reference phylogeny. Altogether, our results show that long amplicons can be treated in a full phylogenetic framework to provide greater taxonomic resolution and a robust evolutionary perspective to environmental DNA.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonardo de Oliveira Martins ◽  
Andrew J Page ◽  
Alison E Mather ◽  
Ian G Charles

Abstract DNA barcoding through the use of amplified regions of the ribosomal operon, such as the 16S gene, is a routine method to gain an overview of the microbial taxonomic diversity within a sample without the need to isolate and culture the microbes present. However, bacterial cells usually have multiple copies of this ribosomal operon, and choosing the ‘wrong’ copy could provide a misleading species classification. While this presents less of a problem for well-characterized organisms with large sequence databases to interrogate, it is a significant challenge for lesser known organisms with unknown copy number and diversity. Using the entire length of the ribosomal operon, which encompasses the 16S, 23S, 5S and internal transcribed spacer regions, should provide greater taxonomic resolution but has not been well explored. Here, we use publicly available reference genomes and explore the theoretical boundaries when using concatenated genes and the full-length ribosomal operons, which has been made possible by the development and uptake of long-read sequencing technologies. We quantify the issues of both copy choice and operon length in a phylogenetic context to demonstrate that longer regions improve the phylogenetic signal while maintaining taxonomic accuracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Aury ◽  
Benjamin Istace

Abstract Single-molecule sequencing technologies have recently been commercialized by Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore with the promise of sequencing long DNA fragments (kilobases to megabases order) and then, using efficient algorithms, provide high quality assemblies in terms of contiguity and completeness of repetitive regions. However, the error rate of long-read technologies is higher than that of short-read technologies. This has a direct consequence on the base quality of genome assemblies, particularly in coding regions where sequencing errors can disrupt the coding frame of genes. In the case of diploid genomes, the consensus of a given gene can be a mixture between the two haplotypes and can lead to premature stop codons. Several methods have been developed to polish genome assemblies using short reads and generally, they inspect the nucleotide one by one, and provide a correction for each nucleotide of the input assembly. As a result, these algorithms are not able to properly process diploid genomes and they typically switch from one haplotype to another. Herein we proposed Hapo-G (Haplotype-Aware Polishing Of Genomes), a new algorithm capable of incorporating phasing information from high-quality reads (short or long-reads) to polish genome assemblies and in particular assemblies of diploid and heterozygous genomes.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Berná ◽  
Matías Rodríguez ◽  
María Laura Chiribao ◽  
Adriana Parodi-Talice ◽  
Sebastián Pita ◽  
...  

Although the genome ofTrypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, was first made available in 2005, with additional strains reported later, the intrinsic genome complexity of this parasite (abundance of repetitive sequences and genes organized in tandem) has traditionally hindered high-quality genome assembly and annotation. This also limits diverse types of analyses that require high degree of precision. Long reads generated by third-generation sequencing technologies are particularly suitable to address the challenges associated withT. cruzi´sgenome since they permit directly determining the full sequence of large clusters of repetitive sequences without collapsing them. This, in turn, allows not only accurate estimation of gene copy numbers but also circumvents assembly fragmentation. Here, we present the analysis of the genome sequences of twoT. cruziclones: the hybrid TCC (DTU TcVI) and the non-hybrid Dm28c (DTU TcI), determined by PacBio SMRT technology. The improved assemblies herein obtained permitted us to accurately estimate gene copy numbers, abundance and distribution of repetitive sequences (including satellites and retroelements). We found that the genome ofT. cruziis composed of a "core compartment" and a "disruptive compartment" which exhibit opposite gene and GC content composition. New tandem and disperse repetitive sequences were identified, including some located inside coding sequences. Additionally, homologous chromosomes were separately assembled, allowing us to retrieve haplotypes as separate contigs instead of a unique mosaic sequence. Finally, manual annotation of surface multigene families MUC and trans-sialidases allows now a better overview of these complex groups of genes.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jia-Xing Yue ◽  
Gianni Liti

AbstractLong-read sequencing technologies have become increasingly popular in genome projects due to their strengths in resolving complex genomic regions. As a leading model organism with small genome size and great biotechnological importance, the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has many isolates currently being sequenced with long reads. However, analyzing long-read sequencing data to produce high-quality genome assembly and annotation remains challenging. Here we present LRSDAY, the first one-stop solution to streamline this process. LRSDAY can produce chromosome-level end-to-end genome assembly and comprehensive annotations for various genomic features (including centromeres, protein-coding genes, tRNAs, transposable elements and telomere-associated elements) that are ready for downstream analysis. Although tailored for S. cerevisiae, we designed LRSDAY to be highly modular and customizable, making it adaptable for virtually any eukaryotic organisms. Applying LRSDAY to a S. cerevisiae strain takes ∼43 hrs to generate a complete and well-annotated genome from ∼100X Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) reads using four threads.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Bolognini ◽  
Alberto Magi

Structural variants (SVs) are genomic rearrangements that involve at least 50 nucleotides and are known to have a serious impact on human health. While prior short-read sequencing technologies have often proved inadequate for a comprehensive assessment of structural variation, more recent long reads from Oxford Nanopore Technologies have already been proven invaluable for the discovery of large SVs and hold the potential to facilitate the resolution of the full SV spectrum. With many long-read sequencing studies to follow, it is crucial to assess factors affecting current SV calling pipelines for nanopore sequencing data. In this brief research report, we evaluate and compare the performances of five long-read SV callers across four long-read aligners using both real and synthetic nanopore datasets. In particular, we focus on the effects of read alignment, sequencing coverage, and variant allele depth on the detection and genotyping of SVs of different types and size ranges and provide insights into precision and recall of SV callsets generated by integrating the various long-read aligners and SV callers. The computational pipeline we propose is publicly available at https://github.com/davidebolo1993/EViNCe and can be adjusted to further evaluate future nanopore sequencing datasets.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuya Kiguchi ◽  
Suguru Nishijima ◽  
Naveen Kumar ◽  
Masahira Hattori ◽  
Wataru Suda

Abstract Background: The ecological and biological features of the indigenous phage community (virome) in the human gut microbiome are poorly understood, possibly due to many fragmented contigs and fewer complete genomes based on conventional short-read metagenomics. Long-read sequencing technologies have attracted attention as an alternative approach to reconstruct long and accurate contigs from microbial communities. However, the impact of long-read metagenomics on human gut virome analysis has not been well evaluated. Results: Here we present chimera-less PacBio long-read metagenomics of multiple displacement amplification (MDA)-treated human gut virome DNA. The method included the development of a novel bioinformatics tool, SACRA (Split Amplified Chimeric Read Algorithm), which efficiently detects and splits numerous chimeric reads in PacBio reads from the MDA-treated virome samples. SACRA treatment of PacBio reads from five samples markedly reduced the average chimera ratio from 72 to 1.5%, generating chimera-less PacBio reads with an average read-length of 1.8 kb. De novo assembly of the chimera-less long reads generated contigs with an average N50 length of 11.1 kb, whereas those of MiSeq short reads from the same samples were 0.7 kb, dramatically improving contig extension. Alignment of both contig sets generated 378 high-quality merged contigs (MCs) composed of the minimum scaffolds of 434 MiSeq and 637 PacBio contigs, respectively, and also identified numerous MiSeq short fragmented contigs ≤500 bp additionally aligned to MCs, which possibly originated from a small fraction of MiSeq chimeric reads. The alignment also revealed that fragmentations of the scaffolded MiSeq contigs were caused primarily by genomic complexity of the community, including local repeats, hypervariable regions, and highly conserved sequences in and between the phage genomes. We identified 142 complete and near-complete phage genomes including 108 novel genomes, varying from 5 to 185 kb in length, the majority of which were predicted to be Microviridae phages including several variants with homologous but distinct genomes, which were fragmented in MiSeq contigs. Conclusions: Long-read metagenomics coupled with SACRA provides an improved method to reconstruct accurate and extended phage genomes from MDA-treated virome samples of the human gut, and potentially from other environmental virome samples.


F1000Research ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Ammar ◽  
Tara A. Paton ◽  
Dax Torti ◽  
Adam Shlien ◽  
Gary D. Bader

Haplotypes are often critical for the interpretation of genetic laboratory observations into medically actionable findings. Current massively parallel DNA sequencing technologies produce short sequence reads that are often unable to resolve haplotype information. Phasing short read data typically requires supplemental statistical phasing based on known haplotype structure in the population or parental genotypic data. Here we demonstrate that the MinION nanopore sequencer is capable of producing very long reads to resolve both variants and haplotypes of HLA-A, HLA-B and CYP2D6 genes important in determining patient drug response in sample NA12878 of CEPH/UTAH pedigree 1463, without the need for statistical phasing. Long read data from a single 24-hour nanopore sequencing run was used to reconstruct haplotypes, which were confirmed by HapMap data and statistically phased Complete Genomics and Sequenom genotypes. Our results demonstrate that nanopore sequencing is an emerging standalone technology with potential utility in a clinical environment to aid in medical decision-making.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Di Genova ◽  
Gonzalo A. Ruz ◽  
Marie-France Sagot ◽  
Alejandro Maass

ABSTRACTLong read sequencing technologies are the ultimate solution for genome repeats, allowing near reference level reconstructions of large genomes. However, long read de novo assembly pipelines are computationally intense and require a considerable amount of coverage, thereby hindering their broad application to the assembly of large genomes. Alternatively, hybrid assembly methods which combine short and long read sequencing technologies can reduce the time and cost required to produce de novo assemblies of large genomes. In this paper, we propose a new method, called FAST-SG, which uses a new ultra-fast alignment-free algorithm specifically designed for constructing a scaffolding graph using light-weight data structures. FAST-SG can construct the graph from either short or long reads. This allows the reuse of efficient algorithms designed for short read data and permits the definition of novel modular hybrid assembly pipelines. Using comprehensive standard datasets and benchmarks, we show how FAST-SG outperforms the state-of-the-art short read aligners when building the scaffolding graph, and can be used to extract linking information from either raw or error-corrected long reads. We also show how a hybrid assembly approach using FAST-SG with shallow long read coverage (5X) and moderate computational resources can produce long-range and accurate reconstructions of the genomes of Arabidopsis thaliana (Ler-0) and human (NA12878).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon K. B. Seah ◽  
Estienne C. Swart

Ciliates are single-celled eukaryotes that eliminate specific, interspersed DNA sequences (internally eliminated sequences, IESs) from their genomes during development. These are challenging to annotate and assemble because IES-containing sequences are much less abundant in the cell than those without, and IES sequences themselves often contain repetitive and low-complexity sequences. Long read sequencing technologies from Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore have the potential to reconstruct longer IESs than has been possible with short reads, and also the ability to detect correlations of neighboring element elimination. Here we present BleTIES, a software toolkit for detecting, assembling, and analyzing IESs using mapped long reads. Availability and implementation: BleTIES is implemented in Python 3. Source code is available at https://github.com/Swart-lab/bleties (MIT license), and also distributed via Bioconda. Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information: Benchmarking of BleTIES with published sequence data.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheng He ◽  
Guifang Lin ◽  
Hairong Wei ◽  
Haibao Tang ◽  
Frank F White ◽  
...  

Abstract Genome sequences provide genomic maps with a single-base resolution for exploring genetic contents. Sequencing technologies, particularly long reads, have revolutionized genome assemblies for producing highly continuous genome sequences. However, current long-read sequencing technologies generate inaccurate reads that contain many errors. Some errors are retained in assembled sequences, which are typically not completely corrected by using either long reads or more accurate short reads. The issue commonly exists, but few tools are dedicated for computing error rates or determining error locations. In this study, we developed a novel approach, referred to as k-mer abundance difference (KAD), to compare the inferred copy number of each k-mer indicated by short reads and the observed copy number in the assembly. Simple KAD metrics enable to classify k-mers into categories that reflect the quality of the assembly. Specifically, the KAD method can be used to identify base errors and estimate the overall error rate. In addition, sequence insertion and deletion as well as sequence redundancy can also be detected. Collectively, KAD is valuable for quality evaluation of genome assemblies and, potentially, provides a diagnostic tool to aid in precise error correction. KAD software has been developed to facilitate public uses.


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