scholarly journals Assembly of chloroplast genomes with long- and short-read data: a comparison of approaches using Eucalyptus pauciflora as a test case

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
weiwen wang ◽  
Miriam Schalamun ◽  
Alejandro Morales Suarez ◽  
David Kainer ◽  
Benjamin Schwessinger ◽  
...  

AbstractBackgroundChloroplasts are organelles that conduct photosynthesis in plant and algal cells. Chloroplast genomes code for around 130 genes, and the information they contain is widely used in agriculture and studies of evolution and ecology. Correctly assembling complete chloroplast genomes can be challenging because the chloroplast genome contains a pair of long inverted repeats (10–30 kb). The advent of long-read sequencing technologies should alleviate this problem by providing sufficient information to completely span the inverted repeat regions. Yet, long-reads tend to have higher error rates than short-reads, and relatively little is known about the best way to combine long- and short-reads to obtain the most accurate chloroplast genome assemblies. Using Eucalyptus pauciflora, the snow gum, as a test case, we evaluated the effect of multiple parameters, such as different coverage of long (Oxford nanopore) and short (Illumina) reads, different long-read lengths, different assembly pipelines, and different genome polishing steps, with a view to determining the most accurate and efficient approach to chloroplast genome assembly.ResultsHybrid assemblies combining at least 20x coverage of both long-reads and short-reads generated a single contig spanning the entire chloroplast genome with few or no detectable errors. Short-read-only assemblies generated three contigs representing the long single copy, short single copy and inverted repeat regions of the chloroplast genome. These contigs contained few single-base errors but tended to exclude several bases at the beginning or end of each contig. Long-read-only assemblies tended to create multiple contigs with a much higher single-base error rate, even after polishing. The chloroplast genome of Eucalyptus pauciflora is 159,942 bp, contains 131 genes of known function, and confirms the phylogenetic position of Eucalyptus pauciflora as a close relative of Eucalyptus regnans.ConclusionsOur results suggest that very accurate assemblies of chloroplast genomes can be achieved using a combination of at least 20x coverage of long- and short-reads respectively, provided that the long-reads contain at least ~5x coverage of reads longer than the inverted repeat region. We show that further increases in coverage give little or no improvement in accuracy, and that hybrid assemblies are more accurate than long-read-only or short-read-only assemblies.

BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Commichaux ◽  
Kiran Javkar ◽  
Padmini Ramachandran ◽  
Niranjan Nagarajan ◽  
Denis Bertrand ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Whole genome sequencing of cultured pathogens is the state of the art public health response for the bioinformatic source tracking of illness outbreaks. Quasimetagenomics can substantially reduce the amount of culturing needed before a high quality genome can be recovered. Highly accurate short read data is analyzed for single nucleotide polymorphisms and multi-locus sequence types to differentiate strains but cannot span many genomic repeats, resulting in highly fragmented assemblies. Long reads can span repeats, resulting in much more contiguous assemblies, but have lower accuracy than short reads. Results We evaluated the accuracy of Listeria monocytogenes assemblies from enrichments (quasimetagenomes) of naturally-contaminated ice cream using long read (Oxford Nanopore) and short read (Illumina) sequencing data. Accuracy of ten assembly approaches, over a range of sequencing depths, was evaluated by comparing sequence similarity of genes in assemblies to a complete reference genome. Long read assemblies reconstructed a circularized genome as well as a 71 kbp plasmid after 24 h of enrichment; however, high error rates prevented high fidelity gene assembly, even at 150X depth of coverage. Short read assemblies accurately reconstructed the core genes after 28 h of enrichment but produced highly fragmented genomes. Hybrid approaches demonstrated promising results but had biases based upon the initial assembly strategy. Short read assemblies scaffolded with long reads accurately assembled the core genes after just 24 h of enrichment, but were highly fragmented. Long read assemblies polished with short reads reconstructed a circularized genome and plasmid and assembled all the genes after 24 h enrichment but with less fidelity for the core genes than the short read assemblies. Conclusion The integration of long and short read sequencing of quasimetagenomes expedited the reconstruction of a high quality pathogen genome compared to either platform alone. A new and more complete level of information about genome structure, gene order and mobile elements can be added to the public health response by incorporating long read analyses with the standard short read WGS outbreak response.


Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 180
Author(s):  
Bagdevi Mishra ◽  
Bartosz Ulaszewski ◽  
Sebastian Ploch ◽  
Jaroslaw Burczyk ◽  
Marco Thines

Chloroplasts are difficult to assemble because of the presence of large inverted repeats. At the same time, correct assemblies are important, as chloroplast loci are frequently used for biogeography and population genetics studies. In an attempt to elucidate the orientation of the single-copy regions and to find suitable loci for chloroplast single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based studies, circular chloroplast sequences for the ultra-centenary reference individual of European Beech (Fagus sylvatica), Bhaga, and an additional Polish individual (named Jamy) was obtained based on hybrid assemblies. The chloroplast genome of Bhaga was 158,458 bp, and that of Jamy was 158,462 bp long. Using long-read mapping on the configuration inferred in this study and the one suggested in a previous study, we found an inverted orientation of the small single-copy region. The chloroplast genome of Bhaga and of the individual from Poland both have only two mismatches as well as three and two indels as compared to the previously published genome, respectively. The low divergence suggests low seed dispersal but high pollen dispersal. However, once chloroplast genomes become available from Pleistocene refugia, where a high degree of variation has been reported, they might prove useful for tracing the migration history of Fagus sylvatica in the Holocene.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Håkon Kaspersen ◽  
Thomas H. A. Haverkamp ◽  
Hanna Karin Ilag ◽  
Øivind Øines ◽  
Camilla Sekse ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT In total, 12 quinolone-resistant Escherichia coli (QREC) strains containing qnrS1 were submitted to long-read sequencing using a FLO-MIN106 flow cell on a MinION device. The long reads were assembled with short reads (Illumina) and analyzed using the MOB-suite pipeline. Six of these QREC genome sequences were closed after hybrid assembly.


Plants ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huyen-Trang Vu ◽  
Ngan Tran ◽  
Thanh-Diem Nguyen ◽  
Quoc-Luan Vu ◽  
My-Huyen Bui ◽  
...  

Paphiopedilum delenatii is a native orchid of Vietnam with highly attractive floral traits. Unfortunately, it is now listed as a critically endangered species with a few hundred individuals remaining in nature. In this study, we performed next-generation sequencing of P. delenatii and assembled its complete chloroplast genome. The whole chloroplast genome of P. delenatii was 160,955 bp in size, 35.6% of which was GC content, and exhibited typical quadripartite structure of plastid genomes with four distinct regions, including the large and small single-copy regions and a pair of inverted repeat regions. There were, in total, 130 genes annotated in the genome: 77 coding genes, 39 tRNA genes, 8 rRNA genes, and 6 pseudogenes. The loss of ndh genes and variation in inverted repeat (IR) boundaries as well as data of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and divergent hotspots provided useful information for identification applications and phylogenetic studies of Paphiopedilum species. Whole chloroplast genomes could be used as an effective super barcode for species identification or for developing other identification markers, which subsequently serves the conservation of Paphiopedilum species.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quang Tran ◽  
Vinhthuy Phan

Abstract Background: Most current metagenomic classifiers and profilers employ short reads to classify, bin and profile microbial genomes that are present in metagenomic samples. Many of these methods adopt techniques that aim to identify unique genomic regions of genomes so as to differentiate them. Because of this, short-read lengths might be suboptimal. Longer read lengths might improve the performance of classification and profiling. However, longer reads produced by current technology tend to have a higher rate of sequencing errors, compared to short reads. It is not clear if the trade-off between longer length versus higher sequencing errors will increase or decrease classification and profiling performance.Results: We compared performance of popular metagenomic classifiers on short reads and longer reads, which are assembled from the same short reads. When using a number of popular assemblers to assemble long reads from the short reads, we discovered that most classifiers made fewer predictions with longer reads and that they achieved higher classification performance on synthetic metagenomic data. Specifically, across most classifiers, we observed a significant increase in precision, while recall remained the same, resulting in higher overall classification performance. On real metagenomic data, we observed a similar trend that classifiers made fewer predictions. This suggested that they might have the same performance characteristics of having higher precision while maintaining the same recall with longer reads.Conclusions: This finding has two main implications. First, it suggests that classifying species in metagenomic environments can be achieved with higher overall performance simply by assembling short reads. This suggested that they might have the same performance characteristics of having higher precision while maintaining the same recall as shorter reads. Second, this finding suggests that it might be a good idea to consider utilizing long-read technologies in species classification for metagenomic applications. Current long-read technologies tend to have higher sequencing errors and are more expensive compared to short-read technologies. The trade-offs between the pros and cons should be investigated.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (S11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arghya Kusum Das ◽  
Sayan Goswami ◽  
Kisung Lee ◽  
Seung-Jong Park

Abstract Background Long-read sequencing has shown the promises to overcome the short length limitations of second-generation sequencing by providing more complete assembly. However, the computation of the long sequencing reads is challenged by their higher error rates (e.g., 13% vs. 1%) and higher cost ($0.3 vs. $0.03 per Mbp) compared to the short reads. Methods In this paper, we present a new hybrid error correction tool, called ParLECH (Parallel Long-read Error Correction using Hybrid methodology). The error correction algorithm of ParLECH is distributed in nature and efficiently utilizes the k-mer coverage information of high throughput Illumina short-read sequences to rectify the PacBio long-read sequences.ParLECH first constructs a de Bruijn graph from the short reads, and then replaces the indel error regions of the long reads with their corresponding widest path (or maximum min-coverage path) in the short read-based de Bruijn graph. ParLECH then utilizes the k-mer coverage information of the short reads to divide each long read into a sequence of low and high coverage regions, followed by a majority voting to rectify each substituted error base. Results ParLECH outperforms latest state-of-the-art hybrid error correction methods on real PacBio datasets. Our experimental evaluation results demonstrate that ParLECH can correct large-scale real-world datasets in an accurate and scalable manner. ParLECH can correct the indel errors of human genome PacBio long reads (312 GB) with Illumina short reads (452 GB) in less than 29 h using 128 compute nodes. ParLECH can align more than 92% bases of an E. coli PacBio dataset with the reference genome, proving its accuracy. Conclusion ParLECH can scale to over terabytes of sequencing data using hundreds of computing nodes. The proposed hybrid error correction methodology is novel and rectifies both indel and substitution errors present in the original long reads or newly introduced by the short reads.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaina Shumate ◽  
Brandon Wong ◽  
Geo Pertea ◽  
Mihaela Pertea

Short-read RNA sequencing and long-read RNA sequencing each have their strengths and weaknesses for transcriptome assembly. While short reads are highly accurate, they are unable to span multiple exons. Long-read technology can capture full-length transcripts, but its high error rate often leads to mis-identified splice sites, and its low throughput makes quantification difficult. Here we present a new release of StringTie that performs hybrid-read assembly. By taking advantage of the strengths of both long and short reads, hybrid-read assembly with StringTie is more accurate than long-read only or short-read only assembly, and on some datasets it can more than double the number of correctly assembled transcripts, while obtaining substantially higher precision than the long-read data assembly alone. Here we demonstrate the improved accuracy on simulated data and real data from Arabidopsis thaliana, Mus musculus,and human. We also show that hybrid-read assembly is more accurate than correcting long reads prior to assembly while also being substantially faster. StringTie is freely available as open source software at https://github.com/gpertea/stringtie.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnes Scheunert ◽  
Marco Dorfner ◽  
Thomas Lingl ◽  
Christoph Oberprieler

AbstractThe chloroplast genome harbors plenty of valuable information for phylogenetic research. Illumina short-read data is generally used for de novo assembly of whole plastomes. PacBio or Oxford Nanopore long reads are additionally employed in hybrid approaches to enable assembly across the highly similar inverted repeats of a chloroplast genome. Unlike for PacBio, plastome assemblies based solely on Nanopore reads are rarely found, due to their high error rate and non-random error profile. However, the actual quality decline connected to their use has never been quantified. Furthermore, no study has employed reference-based assembly using Nanopore reads, which is common with Illumina data. Using Leucanthemum Mill. as an example, we compared the sequence quality of seven plastome assemblies of the same species, using combinations of two sequencing platforms and three analysis pipelines. In addition, we assessed the factors which might influence Nanopore assembly quality during sequence generation and bioinformatic processing.The consensus sequence derived from de novo assembly of Nanopore data had a sequence identity of 99.59% compared to Illumina short-read de novo assembly. Most of the found errors comprise indels (81.5%), and a large majority of them is part of homopolymer regions. The quality of reference-based assembly is heavily dependent upon the choice of a close-enough reference. Using a reference with 0.83% sequence divergence from the studied species, mapping of Nanopore reads results in a consensus comparable to that from Nanopore de novo assembly, and of only slightly inferior quality compared to a reference-based assembly with Illumina data (0.49% and 0.26% divergence from Illumina de novo). For optimal assembly of Nanopore data, appropriate filtering of contaminants and chimeric sequences, as well as employing moderate read coverage, is essential.Based on these results, we conclude that Nanopore long reads are a suitable alternative to Illumina short reads in plastome phylogenomics. Only few errors remain in the finalized assembly, which can be easily masked in phylogenetic analyses without loss in analytical accuracy. The easily applicable and cost-effective technology might warrant more attention by researchers dealing with plant chloroplast genomes.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weiwen Wang ◽  
Robert Lanfear

AbstractThe chloroplast genome usually has a quadripartite structure consisting of a large single copy region and a small single copy region separated by two long inverted repeats. It has been known for some time that a single cell may contain at least two structural haplotypes of this structure, which differ in the relative orientation of the single copy regions. However, the methods required to detect and measure the abundance of the structural haplotypes are labour-intensive, and this phenomenon remains understudied. Here we develop a new method, Cp-hap, to detect all possible structural haplotypes of chloroplast genomes of quadripartite structure using long-read sequencing data. We use this method to conduct a systematic analysis and quantification of chloroplast structural haplotypes in 61 land plant species across 19 orders of Angiosperms, Gymnosperms and Pteridophytes. Our results show that there are two chloroplast structural haplotypes which occur with equal frequency in most land plant individuals. Nevertheless, species whose chloroplast genomes lack inverted repeats or have short inverted repeats have just a single structural haplotype. We also show that the relative abundance of the two structural haplotypes remains constant across multiple samples from a single individual plant, suggesting that the process which maintains equal frequency of the two haplotypes operates rapidly, consistent with the hypothesis that flip-flop recombination mediates chloroplast structural heteroplasmy. Our results suggest that previous claims of differences in chloroplast genome structure between species may need to be revisited.Significance StatementChloroplast genome consists of a large single copy region, a small single copy region, and two inverted repeats. Some decades ago, a discovery showed that there are two types chloroplast genome in some plants, which differ the way that the four regions are put together. However, this phenomenon has been shown in just a small number of species, and many open questions remain. Here, we develop a fast method to measure the chloroplast genome structures, based on long-reads. We show that almost all plants we analysed contain two possible genome structures, while a few plants contain only one structure. Our findings hint at the causes of the phenomenon, and provide a convenient new method with which to make rapid progress.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose M. Haro-Moreno ◽  
Mario López-Pérez ◽  
Francisco Rodríguez-Valera

ABSTRACTBackgroundThird-generation sequencing has penetrated little in metagenomics due to the high error rate and dependence for assembly on short-read designed bioinformatics. However, 2nd generation sequencing metagenomics (mostly Illumina) suffers from limitations, particularly in allowing assembly of microbes with high microdiversity or retrieving the flexible (adaptive) compartment of prokaryotic genomes.ResultsHere we have used different 3rd generation techniques to study the metagenome of a well-known marine sample from the mixed epipelagic water column of the winter Mediterranean. We have compared Oxford Nanopore and PacBio last generation technologies with the classical approach using Illumina short reads followed by assembly. PacBio Sequel II CCS appears particularly suitable for cellular metagenomics due to its low error rate. Long reads allow efficient direct retrieval of complete genes (473M/Tb) and operons before assembly, facilitating annotation and compensates the limitations of short reads or short-read assemblies. MetaSPAdes was the most appropriate assembly program when used in combination with short reads. The assemblies of the long reads allow also the reconstruction of much more complete metagenome-assembled genomes, even from microbes with high microdiversity. The flexible genome of reconstructed MAGs is much more complete and allows rescuing more adaptive genes.ConclusionsFor most applications of metagenomics, from community structure analysis to ecosystem functioning, long-reads should be applied whenever possible. Particularly for in-silico screening of biotechnologically useful genes, or population genomics, long-read metagenomics appears presently as a very fruitful approach and can be used from raw reads, before a computing-demanding (and potentially artefactual) assembly step.


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