Euan Ashley from Stanford University started with the premise that while current efforts in the field of genomics medicine address 30% of patient cases, there’s a need for new approaches to make sense of the remaining 70%. Toward that end, he said that accurately calling structural variants is a major need. In one translational research example, Ashley said that SMRT Sequencing with the Sequel System allowed his team to identify six potentially causative genes in an individual with complex and varied symptoms; one gene was associated with Carney syndrome, which was a match for the person’s physiology and was later…
Michael Lutz, from the Duke University Medical Center, discussed a recently published software tool that can now be used in a pipeline with SMRT Sequencing data to find structural variant biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and Lewy body dementia. His team is particularly interested in short sequence repeats and short tandem repeats, which have already been implicated in neurodegenerative disease.
In this ASHG 2020 PacBio Workshop Jonas Korlach, CSO, shares how the new PacBio Sequel IIe System makes highly accurate long-read sequencing easy and affordable so?all scientists can gain comprehensive views of human genomes and transcriptomes. He goes on to provide updates on the applications including human WGS for variant detection, de novo genome assembly, single-cell full-length RNA sequencing, and targeted sequencing using PCR and No-Amp methods.
In the past decade, the human microbiome has been increasingly shown to play a major role in health. For example, imbalances in gut microbiota appear to be associated with Type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and cardiovascular disease. Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a major determinant of the long-term prognosis among T2DM patients, with a 2- to 4-fold increased mortality risk when present. However, the exact microbial strains or functions implicated in disease need further investigation. From a large study with 523 participants (185 healthy controls, 186 T2DM patients without CAD, and 106 T2DM patients with CAD), 3 samples from each…
PacBio 2014 User Group Meeting Presentation Slides: Alisha Holloway of the Gladstone Institutes presented on the use of isoform sequencing (Iso-Seq) to improve the annotation of the chicken genome as a model reference for cardiovascular research.
New drugs with novel mechanisms of resistance are desperately needed to address both community and nosocomial infections due to Gram-negative bacteria. One such potential target is LpxC, an essential enzyme that catalyzes the first committed step of Lipid A biosynthesis. Achaogen conducted an extensive research campaign to discover novel LpxC inhibitors with activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa We report here the in vitro antibacterial activity and pharmacodynamics of ACHN-975, the only molecule from these efforts and the first ever LpxC inhibitor to be evaluated in Phase 1 clinical trials. In addition, we describe the profile of three additional LpxC inhibitors that…
New technologies and analysis methods are enabling genomic structural variants (SVs) to be detected with ever-increasing accuracy, resolution, and comprehensiveness. Translating these methods to routine research and clinical practice requires robust benchmark sets. We developed the first benchmark set for identification of both false negative and false positive germline SVs, which complements recent efforts emphasizing increasingly comprehensive characterization of SVs. To create this benchmark for a broadly consented son in a Personal Genome Project trio with broadly available cells and DNA, the Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) Consortium integrated 19 sequence-resolved variant calling methods, both alignment- and de novo assembly-based,…
The spread of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE), contributing to widespread carbapenem resistance, has become a global concern. However, the specific dissemination patterns of carbapenemase genes have not been intensively investigated in developing countries, including Myanmar, where NDM-type carbapenemases are spreading in clinical settings. In the present study, we phenotypically and genetically characterized 91 CPE isolates obtained from clinical (n = 77) and environmental (n = 14) samples in Yangon, Myanmar. We determined the dissemination of plasmids harboring genes encoding NDM-1 and its variants using whole-genome sequencing and plasmid analysis. IncFII plasmids harboring blaNDM-5 and IncX3 plasmids harboring blaNDM-4 or blaNDM-7 were…
To date, clinical sequencing has focused on genomic DNA using targeted panels and exome sequencing. Sequencing of a large hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) cohort revealed that positive identification of a disease-associated variant was returned in only 32% of patients, with an additional 15% receiving inconclusive results. When genome sequencing fails to reveal causative variants, the transcriptome may provide additional diagnostic clarity. A recent study examining patients with genetically undiagnosed muscle disorders found that RNA sequencing, when used as a complement to exome and whole genome sequencing, had an overall diagnosis rate of 35%.
Chagas disease is a complex tropical pathology caused by the kinetoplastid Trypanosoma cruzi. This parasite displays massive genetic diversity and has been classified by international consensus in at least six Discrete Typing Units (DTUs) that are broadly distributed in the American continent. The main clinical manifestation of the disease is the chronic chagasic cardiomyopathy (CCC) that is lethal in the infected individuals. However, one intriguing feature is that only 30-40% of the infected individuals will develop CCC. Some authors have suggested that the immune response, host genetic factors, virulence factors and even the massive genetic heterogeneity of T. cruzi are…
Pyropia haitanensis is a high-yield commercial seaweed in China. Pyropia haitanensis farms often suffer from problems such as severe germplasm degeneration, while the mechanisms underlying resistance to abiotic stresses remain unknown because of lacking genomic information. Although many previous studies focused on using next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, the short-read sequences generated by NGS generally prevent the assembly of full-length transcripts, and then limit screening functional genes. In the present study, which was based on hybrid sequencing (NGS and single-molecular real-time sequencing) of the P. haitanensis thallus transcriptome, we obtained high-quality full-length transcripts with a mean length of 2998 bp and…
Monitor lizards are unique among ectothermic reptiles in that they have high aerobic capacity and distinctive cardiovascular physiology resembling that of endothermic mammals. Here, we sequence the genome of the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, the largest extant monitor lizard, and generate a high-resolution de novo chromosome-assigned genome assembly for V. komodoensis using a hybrid approach of long-range sequencing and single-molecule optical mapping. Comparing the genome of V. komodoensis with those of related species, we find evidence of positive selection in pathways related to energy metabolism, cardiovascular homoeostasis, and haemostasis. We also show species-specific expansions of a chemoreceptor gene family related…
Ginkgo biloba, which contains flavonoids as bioactive components, is widely used in traditional Chinese medicine. Increasing the flavonoid production of medicinal plants through genetic engineering generally focuses on the key genes involved in flavonoid biosynthesis. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying such biosynthesis are not yet well understood. To understand these mechanisms, a combination of second-generation sequencing (SGS) and single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing was applied to G. biloba. Eight tissues were sampled for SMRT sequencing to generate a high-quality, full-length transcriptome database. From 23.36 Gb clean reads, 12,954 alternative polyadenylation events, 12,290 alternative splicing events, 929 fusion transcripts, 2,286 novel transcripts,…
The development of clustered regularly interspaced short-palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-Cas systems for genome editing has transformed the way life science research is conducted and holds enormous potential for the treatment of disease as well as for many aspects of biotech- nology. Here, I provide a personal perspective on the development of CRISPR-Cas9 for genome editing within the broader context of the field and discuss our work to discover novel Cas effectors and develop them into additional molecular tools. The initial demonstra- tion of Cas9-mediated genome editing launched the development of many other technologies, enabled new lines of biological inquiry, and motivated…
Crop domestication changed the course of human evolution, and domestication of maize (Zea mays L. subspecies mays), today the world’s most important crop, enabled civilizations to flourish and has played a major role in shaping the world we know today. Archaeological and ethnobotanical research help us understand the development of the cultures and the movements of the peoples who carried maize to new areas where it continued to adapt. Ancient remains of maize cobs and kernels have been found in the place of domestication, the Balsas River Valley (~9,000 years before present era), and the cultivation center, the Tehuacan Valley…