Bacteria harboring conjugative plasmids have the potential for spreading antibiotic resistance through horizontal gene transfer. It is described that the selection and dissemination of antibiotic resistance is enhanced by stressors, like metals or antibiotics, which can occur as environmental contaminants. This study aimed at unveiling the composition of the conjugative plasmidome of a hospital effluent multidrug resistant Escherichia coli strain (H1FC54) under different mating conditions. To meet this objective, plasmid pulsed field gel electrophoresis, optical mapping analyses and DNA sequencing were used in combination with phenotype analysis. Strain H1FC54 was observed to harbor five plasmids, three of which were conjugative…
Long-read sequencing, CENP-A ChIP, and chromatin fiber imaging reveal the composition and organization of Drosophila melanogaster centromeres, which have long remained elusive despite the high quality of this species’ genome. assembly.
Ali Bashir from the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai describes a tool to detect tandem repeats (PACMonSTR), which he believes are dramatically underrepresented in the human genome reference but that can be discovered with PacBio sequencing. In a collaboration with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Cornell, Bashir and his team generated shotgun, whole-genome sequence data from human genomic DNA using PacBio sequencing. Their goal was to find structural variation features that are not present in the existing reference. He shows numerous examples wherein the long PacBio reads were able to resolve inversions in the sample,…
Melissa Laird Smith discussed how the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai uses long-read sequencing for translational research. She gave several examples of targeted sequencing projects run on the Sequel System including CYP2D6, phased mutations of GLA in Fabry’s disease, structural variation breakpoint validation in glioblastoma, and full-length immune profiling of TCR sequences.
Although the accuracy of the human reference genome is critical for basic and clinical research, structural variants (SVs) have been difficult to assess because data capable of resolving them have been limited. To address potential bias, we sequenced a diversity panel of nine human genomes to high depth using long-read, single-molecule, real-time sequencing data. Systematically identifying and merging SVs =50 bp in length for these nine and one public genome yielded 83,909 sequence-resolved insertions, deletions, and inversions. Among these, 2,839 (2.0 Mbp) are shared among all discovery genomes with an additional 13,349 (6.9 Mbp) present in the majority of humans,…