We report the sequencing and assembly of a reference genome for the human GM12878 Utah/Ceph cell line using the MinION (Oxford Nanopore Technologies) nanopore sequencer. 91.2 Gb of sequence data, representing ~30× theoretical coverage, were produced. Reference-based alignment enabled detection of large structural variants and epigenetic modifications. De novo assembly of nanopore reads alone yielded a contiguous assembly (NG50 ~3 Mb). Next, we developed a protocol to generate ultra-long reads (N50 > 100kb, up to 882 kb). Incorporating an additional 5×-coverage of this data type more than doubled the assembly contiguity (NG50 ~6.4 Mb). The final assembled genome was 2,867 million bases in size, covering 85.8% of the reference. Assembly accuracy, after incorporating complementary short-read sequencing data, exceeded 99.8%. Ultra-long reads enabled assembly and phasing of the 4 Mb major histocompatibility complex (MHC) locus in its entirety, measurement of telomere repeat length and closure of gaps in the reference human genome assembly GRCh38.
Nanopore sequencing is a promising technique for genome sequencing due to its portability, ability to sequence long reads from single molecules, and to simultaneously assay DNA methylation. However until recently nanopore sequencing has been mainly applied to small genomes, due to the limited output attainable. We present nanopore sequencing and assembly of the GM12878 Utah/Ceph human reference genome generated using the Oxford Nanopore MinION and R9.4 version chemistry. We generated 91.2 Gb of sequence data (~30× theoretical coverage) from 39 flowcells. De novo assembly yielded a highly complete and contiguous assembly (NG50 ~3Mb). We observed considerable variability in homopolymeric tract resolution between different basecallers. The data permitted sensitive detection of both large structural variants and epigenetic modifications. Further we developed a new approach exploiting the long-read capability of this system and found that adding an additional 5×-coverage of 'ultra-long' reads (read N50 of 99.7kb) more than doubled the assembly contiguity. Modelling the repeat structure of the human genome predicts extraordinarily contiguous assemblies may be possible using nanopore reads alone. Portable de novo sequencing of human genomes may be important for rapid point-of-care diagnosis of rare genetic diseases and cancer, and monitoring of cancer progression. The complete dataset including raw signal is
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