Full-coverage sequencing of HIV-1 provirus from a reference plasmid
ABSTRACTObjective(s)To evaluate nanopore DNA sequencing for sequencing full-length HIV-1 provirus.DesignI used nanopore sequencing to sequence full-length HIV-1 from a plasmid (pHXB2).MethodspHXB2 plasmid was processed with the Rapid PCR-Barcoding library kit and sequenced on the MinION sequencer (Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Oxford., UK). Raw fast5 reads were converted into fastq (base called) with Albacore, Guppy, and FlipFlop base callers. Reads were first aligned to the reference with BWA-MEM to evaluate sample coverage manually. Reads were then assembled with Canu into contigs, and contigs manually finished in SnapGene.ResultsI sequenced full-length HXB2 HIV-1 from 5’ to 3’ LTR (100%), with median per-base coverage of over 9000x in one 12-barcoded experiment on a single MinION flow cell. The longest HIV-spanning read to-date was generated, at a length of 11,487 bases, which included full-length HIV-1 and plasmid backbone on either side. At least 20 variants were discovered in pHXB2 compared to reference.ConclusionsThe MinION sequencer performed as-expected, covering full-length HIV. The discovery of variants in a dogmatic reference plasmid demonstrates the need for single-molecule sequence verification moving forward. These results illustrate the utility of long read sequencing to advance the study of HIV at single integration site resolution.