Project description:This study aimed at identification of genetic regulations for desiccation tolerance in intertidal seaweed species Ulva lactuca most commonly experienced phenomenon of intertidal communities.
Project description:Single-molecule sequencing instruments can generate multikilobase sequences with the potential to greatly improve genome and transcriptome assembly. However, the error rates of single-molecule reads are high, which has limited their use thus far to resequencing bacteria. To address this limitation, we introduce a correction algorithm and assembly strategy that uses short, high-fidelity sequences to correct the error in single-molecule sequences. We demonstrate the utility of this approach on reads generated by a PacBio RS instrument from phage, prokaryotic and eukaryotic whole genomes, including the previously unsequenced genome of the parrot Melopsittacus undulatus, as well as for RNA-Seq reads of the corn (Zea mays) transcriptome. Our long-read correction achieves >99.9% base-call accuracy, leading to substantially better assemblies than current sequencing strategies: in the best example, the median contig size was quintupled relative to high-coverage, second-generation assemblies. Greater gains are predicted if read lengths continue to increase, including the prospect of single-contig bacterial chromosome assembly.
Project description:Plasmids are a foundational tool for basic and applied research across all subfields of biology. Increasingly, researchers in synthetic biology are relying on and developing massive libraries of plasmids as vectors for directed evolution, combinatorial gene circuit tests, and for CRISPR multiplexing. Verification of plasmid sequences following synthesis is a crucial quality control step that creates a bottleneck in plasmid fabrication workflows. Crucially, researchers often elect to forego the cumbersome verification step, potentially leading to reproducibility and-depending on the application-security issues. In order to facilitate plasmid verification to improve the quality and reproducibility of life science research, we developed a fast, simple, and open source pipeline for assembly and verification of plasmid sequences from Illumina reads. We demonstrate that our pipeline, which relies on de novo assembly, can also be used to detect contaminating sequences in plasmid samples. In addition to presenting our pipeline, we discuss the role for verification and quality control in the increasingly complex life science workflows ushered in by synthetic biology.
Project description:High-copy tandemly organized repeats (TRs), or satellite DNA, is an important but still enigmatic component of eukaryotic genomes. TRs comprise arrays of multi-copy and highly similar tandem repeats, which makes the elucidation of TRs a very challenging task. Oxford Nanopore sequencing data provide a valuable source of information on TR organization at the single molecule level. However, bioinformatics tools for de novo identification of TRs in raw Nanopore data have not been reported so far. We developed NanoTRF, a new python pipeline for TR repeat identification, characterization and consensus monomer sequence assembly. This new pipeline requires only a raw Nanopore read file from low-depth (<1×) genome sequencing. The program generates an informative html report and figures on TR genome abundance, monomer sequence and monomer length. In addition, NanoTRF performs annotation of transposable elements (TEs) sequences within or near satDNA arrays, and the information can be used to elucidate how TR−TE co-evolve in the genome. Moreover, we validated by FISH that the NanoTRF report is useful for the evaluation of TR chromosome organization—clustered or dispersed. Our findings showed that NanoTRF is a robust method for the de novo identification of satellite repeats in raw Nanopore data without prior read assembly. The obtained sequences can be used in many downstream analyses including genome assembly assistance and gap estimation, chromosome mapping and cytogenetic marker development.