纳米孔测序技术应用于食品微生物检测的可行性分析

近些年来DNA测序技术发展迅速,已经从第一代生化测序发展到第三代单分子测序。作为第三代测序技术中的一种不同于当前流行的其他测序技术,纳米孔测序技术是基于电信号的一种物理方法测序。许多研究者通常将高通量测序技术应用于食品微生物的研究,但是将纳米孔测序技术应用于食品中微生物的检测却鲜有报道。Oxford Nanopore Technologies(牛津纳米孔科技公司)研发的DNA测序仪MinION,是世界首例用于商业测序的纳米孔测序仪,经过不断完善,近年来MinION在DNA测序中被广泛应用。MinION 测序一次需要的DNA量约1μg,其标准识别速度为一秒钟识别250个碱基,平均读长可至13kb~20kb,测序准确率可以达到98%。纳米孔测序的高识别速度和高准确率,完全满足快速检测的要求,将其应用于食品中微生物检测是完全可行的。     

单分子纳米孔测序技术及其应用研究进展

测序技术在通量和成本方面有了较大的改进,以单分子纳米孔测序技术为代表的第三代测序技术更是以其超长读长、实时检测和可以直接检测碱基甲基化修饰等优势在医学及生命科学等领域作出了较大贡献。文中就单分子纳米孔测序技术的原理进行了简要描述,并对其在临床、动物、植物、细菌及病毒等领域的应用和其未来的发展方向进行了讨论。     

固态纳米孔:下一代DNA测序技术——原理、工艺与挑战

固态纳米孔测序技术作为新兴的第四代DNA测序技术,具有低成本、高读长、易集成等优势.如今,随着半导体工艺技术的飞速发展,小型化、高速度、大通量的纳米孔测序芯片的实现成为可能.相比传统的测序技术,固态纳米孔测序技术在成本、速度等方面有着十分巨大的优势.然而,作为一种新兴的测序技术,固态纳米孔在制造、测序、集成等方面也存在着诸多挑战.本文主要介绍了纳米孔测序技术的原理、制备工艺和面临的挑战,并展望了未来纳米孔测序技术的发展前景.     

单分子测序技术及应用研究进展

从DNA双螺旋结构的发现开始,生命科学研究进入分子水平,在20世纪70年代出现的测序技术为破译遗传密码作出了巨大贡献.近几年出现的单分子测序技术,可以在单个分子水平读取核苷酸序列,也被称为第三代测序技术,主要代表有HeliScope、Nanopore和PacBio等.与传统的第一代和第二代测序技术相比,第三代测序能够产生更长的碱基读长,能直接对RNA进行测序,无需逆转录,测序速度极快,同时其中某些技术所涉及的设备可以小型化,可便携至野外现场测序.第三代测序技术在生命科学基础理论研究及生物医学临床实践中,具有广泛的应用.本文重点介绍了各种单分子测序技术的原理、优缺点,及其应用研究进展.     

纳米孔测序技术在环境微生物研究中的应用

高通量测序技术是研究环境微生物的有效手段,而以纳米孔测序为代表的第三代测序技术以其测序读长长、测序速度快、测序数据实时监控、仪器方便携带、无GC偏好性、无需经过PCR扩增等显著优势有力推动了环境微生物研究的发展.本文对纳米孔测序技术的技术原理和特点进行了简要概述,重点介绍了纳米孔测序技术在环境微生物扩增子测序、宏基因组...     

纳米孔测序技术在实蝇类害虫检疫鉴定中的应用

【目的】纳米孔测序技术是单分子实时测序技术的一种,正在被广泛应用于临床快速诊断及微生物检测等领域。本研究以实蝇这一类重要的检疫性有害生物为例,探究该技术在昆虫检疫鉴定中应用的可行性,为昆虫检疫鉴定提供新方法。【方法】分别采用一代测序技术和纳米孔测序技术,对14种经形态学鉴定的实蝇成虫进行DNA条形码测序,通过BOLD和NCBI数据库对测序结果进行比对分析,并比较2种测序技术所得序列结果准确性的差异。【结果】通过纳米孔测序,14个实蝇样品在44 min内获得181 Mb bases,每个样品平均得到11280条reads,单个reads的准确度为92.10%~94.53%;经一致性序列校正,所有实蝇样品均可得到与一代测序结果完全一致的序列,序列分析结果与形态学鉴定结果完全一致。【结论】采用本研究的实验流程和数据分析方法,纳米孔测序技术可以应用于实蝇类害虫的检疫鉴定,测序结果准确、高效;本研究提供的实验方案同样适用于基于扩增子测序的物种鉴定,满足大规模样品的高通量精准鉴定需求。     

封面说明

共同的画卷封面设计说明自1997年第一只克隆羊多利的诞生拉开了人造生命的序幕,2010年,可谓是人造生命科学发展的一个新的里程碑。本刊2011年封面设计的灵感来自于人造生命技术的蓬勃发展:①封面背景以第三代测序技术即基于纳米孔的单分子实时DNA测序     

封面说明

共同的画卷封面设计说明自1997年第一只克隆羊多利的诞生拉开了人造生命的序幕,2010年,可谓是人造生命科学发展的一个新的里程碑。本刊2011年封面设计的灵感来自于人造生命技术的蓬勃发展:①封面背景以第三代测序技术即基于纳米孔的单分子实时DNA测序     

封面说明

自1997年第一只克隆羊多利的诞生拉开了人造生命的序幕,2010年,可谓是人造生命科学发展的一个新的里程碑。本刊2011年封面设计的灵感来自于人造生命技术的蓬勃发展：①封面背景以第三代测序技术即基于纳米孔的单分子实时DNA测序技术的研制成功为契机（图中,偏下）,     

封面说明

自1997年第一只克隆羊多利的诞生拉开了人造生命的序幕,2010年,可谓是人造生命科学发展的一个新的里程碑。本刊2011年封面设计的灵感来自于人造生命技术的蓬勃发展：①封面背景以第三代测序技术即基于纳米孔的单分子实时DNA测序技术的研制成功为契机（图中,偏下）,     

Model‐Based Quality Assessment and Base‐Calling for Second‐Generation Sequencing Data

Summary Second‐generation sequencing (sec‐gen) technology can sequence millions of short fragments of DNA in parallel, making it capable of assembling complex genomes for a small fraction of the price and time of previous technologies. In fact, a recently formed international consortium, the 1000 Genomes Project, plans to fully sequence the genomes of approximately 1200 people. The prospect of comparative analysis at the sequence level of a large number of samples across multiple populations may be achieved within the next five years. These data present unprecedented challenges in statistical analysis. For instance, analysis operates on millions of short nucleotide sequences, or reads—strings of A,C,G, or T's, between 30 and 100 characters long—which are the result of complex processing of noisy continuous fluorescence intensity measurements known as base‐calling. The complexity of the base‐calling discretization process results in reads of widely varying quality within and across sequence samples. This variation in processing quality results in infrequent but systematic errors that we have found to mislead downstream analysis of the discretized sequence read data. For instance, a central goal of the 1000 Genomes Project is to quantify across‐sample variation at the single nucleotide level. At this resolution, small error rates in sequencing prove significant, especially for rare variants. Sec‐gen sequencing is a relatively new technology for which potential biases and sources of obscuring variation are not yet fully understood. Therefore, modeling and quantifying the uncertainty inherent in the generation of sequence reads is of utmost importance. In this article, we present a simple model to capture uncertainty arising in the base‐calling procedure of the Illumina/Solexa GA platform. Model parameters have a straightforward interpretation in terms of the chemistry of base‐calling allowing for informative and easily interpretable metrics that capture the variability in sequencing quality. Our model provides these informative estimates readily usable in quality assessment tools while significantly improving base‐calling performance.     

单分子实时测序技术的原理与应用

单分子DNA测序技术是近10年发展起来的新一代测序技术,也称为第三代测序技术,包括单分子实时测序、真正单分子测序、单分子纳米孔测序等技术。文章介绍了单分子实时(Single-molecule real-time,SMRT)测序技术的基本原理、性能以及应用。与Sanger测序法和下一代测序技术相比,SMRT测序具有超长读长、测序周期短、无需模板扩增和直接检测表观修饰位点等特点,为研究人员提供了新选择。同时,SMRT测序的低准确率备受争议(约85%),其中约93%的错误是插入缺失,因此,其数据应用于基因组组装前需先对数据进行纠错处理。目前,SMRT测序在小型基因组从头测序和完整组装中已有良好应用,并且已经或将在表观遗传学、转录组学、大型基因组组装等领域发挥其优势,促进基因组学的研究。     

Nanopore-based Fourth-generation DNA Sequencing Technology

Nanopore-based sequencers, as the fourth-generation DNA sequencing technology, have the potential to quickly and reliably sequence the entire human genome for less than $1000, and possibly for even less than $100. The single-molecule techniques used by this technology allow us to further study the interaction between DNA and protein, as well as between protein and protein.Nanopore analysis opens a new door to molecular biology investigation at the single-molecule scale.In this article, we have reviewed academic achievements in nanopore technology from the past as well as the latest advances, including both biological and solid-state nanopores, and discussed their recent and potential applications.     

Oxford Nanopore MinION Sequencing and Genome Assembly

The revolution of genome sequencing is continuing after the successful second-generation sequencing (SGS) technology. The third-generation sequencing (TGS) technology, led by Pacific Biosciences (PacBio), is progressing rapidly, moving from a technology once only capable of providing data for small genome analysis, or for performing targeted screening, to one that pro-mises high quality de novo assembly and structural variation detection for human-sized genomes. In 2014, the MinION, the first commercial sequencer using nanopore technology, was released by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT). MinION identifies DNA bases by measuring the changes in electrical conductivity generated as DNA strands pass through a biological pore. Its portability, affordability, and speed in data production makes it suitable for real-time applications, the release of the long read sequencer MinION has thus generated much excitement and interest in the geno-mics community. While de novo genome assemblies can be cheaply produced from SGS data, assem-bly continuity is often relatively poor, due to the limited ability of short reads to handle long repeats. Assembly quality can be greatly improved by using TGS long reads, since repetitive regions can be easily expanded into using longer sequencing lengths, despite having higher error rates at the base level. The potential of nanopore sequencing has been demonstrated by various studies in gen-ome surveillance at locations where rapid and reliable sequencing is needed, but where resources are limited.     

Genome assembly using Nanopore-guided long and error-free DNA reads

Background

Long-read sequencing technologies were launched a few years ago, and in contrast with short-read sequencing technologies, they offered a promise of solving assembly problems for large and complex genomes. Moreover by providing long-range information, it could also solve haplotype phasing. However, existing long-read technologies still have several limitations that complicate their use for most research laboratories, as well as in large and/or complex genome projects. In 2014, Oxford Nanopore released the MinION® device, a small and low-cost single-molecule nanopore sequencer, which offers the possibility of sequencing long DNA fragments.

Results

The assembly of long reads generated using the Oxford Nanopore MinION® instrument is challenging as existing assemblers were not implemented to deal with long reads exhibiting close to 30% of errors. Here, we presented a hybrid approach developed to take advantage of data generated using MinION® device. We sequenced a well-known bacterium, Acinetobacter baylyi ADP1 and applied our method to obtain a highly contiguous (one single contig) and accurate genome assembly even in repetitive regions, in contrast to an Illumina-only assembly. Our hybrid strategy was able to generate NaS (Nanopore Synthetic-long) reads up to 60 kb that aligned entirely and with no error to the reference genome and that spanned highly conserved repetitive regions. The average accuracy of NaS reads reached 99.99% without losing the initial size of the input MinION® reads.

Conclusions

We described NaS tool, a hybrid approach allowing the sequencing of microbial genomes using the MinION® device. Our method, based ideally on 20x and 50x of NaS and Illumina reads respectively, provides an efficient and cost-effective way of sequencing microbial or small eukaryotic genomes in a very short time even in small facilities. Moreover, we demonstrated that although the Oxford Nanopore technology is a relatively new sequencing technology, currently with a high error rate, it is already useful in the generation of high-quality genome assemblies.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-015-1519-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

High resolution copy number inference in cancer using short-molecule nanopore sequencing

Genome copy number is an important source of genetic variation in health and disease. In cancer, Copy Number Alterations (CNAs) can be inferred from short-read sequencing data, enabling genomics-based precision oncology. Emerging Nanopore sequencing technologies offer the potential for broader clinical utility, for example in smaller hospitals, due to lower instrument cost, higher portability, and ease of use. Nonetheless, Nanopore sequencing devices are limited in the number of retrievable sequencing reads/molecules compared to short-read sequencing platforms, limiting CNA inference accuracy. To address this limitation, we targeted the sequencing of short-length DNA molecules loaded at optimized concentration in an effort to increase sequence read/molecule yield from a single nanopore run. We show that short-molecule nanopore sequencing reproducibly returns high read counts and allows high quality CNA inference. We demonstrate the clinical relevance of this approach by accurately inferring CNAs in acute myeloid leukemia samples. The data shows that, compared to traditional approaches such as chromosome analysis/cytogenetics, short molecule nanopore sequencing returns more sensitive, accurate copy number information in a cost effective and expeditious manner, including for multiplex samples. Our results provide a framework for short-molecule nanopore sequencing with applications in research and medicine, which includes but is not limited to, CNAs.     

BIGpre: a quality assessment package for next-generation sequencing data

The emergence of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies has significantly improved sequencing throughput and reduced costs. However, the short read length, duplicate reads and massive volume of data make the data processing much more difficult and complicated than the first-generation sequencing technology. Although there are some software packages developed to assess the data quality, those packages either are not easily available to users or require bioinformatics skills and computer resources. Moreover, almost all the quality assessment software currently available didn’t taken into account the sequencing errors when dealing with the duplicate assessment in NGS data. Here, we present a new user-friendly quality assessment software package called BIGpre, which works for both Illumina and 454 platforms. BIGpre contains all the functions of other quality assessment software, such as the correlation between forward and reverse reads, read GC-content distribution, and base Ns quality. More importantly, BIGpre incorporates associated programs to detect and remove duplicate reads after taking sequencing errors into account and trimming low quality reads from raw data as well. BIGpre is primarily written in Perl and integrates graphical capability from the statistics package R. This package produces both tabular and graphical summaries of data quality for sequencing datasets from Illumina and 454 platforms. Processing hundreds of millions reads within minutes, this package provides immediate diagnostic information for user to manipulate sequencing data for downstream analyses. BIGpre is freely available at http://bigpre.sourceforge.net/.     

Coval: Improving Alignment Quality and Variant Calling Accuracy for Next-Generation Sequencing Data

Accurate identification of DNA polymorphisms using next-generation sequencing technology is challenging because of a high rate of sequencing error and incorrect mapping of reads to reference genomes. Currently available short read aligners and DNA variant callers suffer from these problems. We developed the Coval software to improve the quality of short read alignments. Coval is designed to minimize the incidence of spurious alignment of short reads, by filtering mismatched reads that remained in alignments after local realignment and error correction of mismatched reads. The error correction is executed based on the base quality and allele frequency at the non-reference positions for an individual or pooled sample. We demonstrated the utility of Coval by applying it to simulated genomes and experimentally obtained short-read data of rice, nematode, and mouse. Moreover, we found an unexpectedly large number of incorrectly mapped reads in ‘targeted’ alignments, where the whole genome sequencing reads had been aligned to a local genomic segment, and showed that Coval effectively eliminated such spurious alignments. We conclude that Coval significantly improves the quality of short-read sequence alignments, thereby increasing the calling accuracy of currently available tools for SNP and indel identification. Coval is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/coval105/.