Auto Tag: human genome assembly

June 1, 2021  |  

Highly contiguous de novo human genome assembly and long-range haplotype phasing using SMRT Sequencing

The long reads, random error, and unbiased sampling of SMRT Sequencing enables high quality, de novo assembly of the human genome. PacBio long reads are capable of resolving genomic variations at all size scales, including SNPs, insertions, deletions, inversions, translocations, and repeat expansions, all of which are important in understanding the genetic basis for human disease and difficult to access via other technologies. In demonstration of this, we report a new high-quality, diploid aware de novo assembly of Craig Venter’s well-studied genome.

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June 1, 2021  |  

Building a platinum human genome assembly from single haplotype human genomes generated from long molecule sequencing

The human reference sequence has provided a foundation for studies of genome structure, human variation, evolutionary biology, and disease. At the time the reference was originally completed there were some loci recalcitrant to closure; however, the degree to which structural variation and diversity affected our ability to produce a representative genome sequence at these loci was still unknown. Many of these regions in the genome are associated with large, repetitive sequences and exhibit complex allelic diversity such producing a single, haploid representation is not possible. To overcome this challenge, we have sequenced DNA from two hydatidiform moles (CHM1 and CHM13), which are essentially haploid. CHM13 was sequenced with the latest PacBio technology (P6-C5) to 52X genome coverage and assembled using Daligner and Falcon v0.2 (GCA_000983455.1, CHM13_1.1). Compared to the first mole (CHM1) PacBio assembly (GCA_001007805.1, 54X) contig N50 of 4.5Mb, the contig N50 of CHM13_1.1 is almost 13Mb, and there is a 13-fold reduction in the number of contigs. This demonstrates the improved contiguity of sequence generated with the new chemistry. We annotated 50,188 RefSeq transcripts of which only 0.63% were split transcripts, and the repetitive and segmental duplication content was within the expected range. These data all indicate an extremely high quality assembly. Additionally, we sequenced CHM13 DNA using Illumina SBS technology to 60X coverage, aligned these reads to the GRCh37, GRCh38, and CHM13_1.1 assemblies and performed variant calling using the SpeedSeq pipeline. The number of single nucleotide variants (SNV) and indels was comparable between GRCh37 and GRCh38. Regions that showed increased SNV density in GRCh38 compared to GRCh37 could be attributed to the addition of centromeric alpha satellite sequence to the reference assembly. Alternatively, regions of decreased SNV density in GRCh38 were concentrated in regions that were improved from BAC based sequencing of CHM1 such as 1p12 and 1q21 containing the SRGAP2 gene family. The alignment of PacBio reads to GRCh37 and GRCh38 assemblies allowed us to resolve complex loci such as the MHC region where the best alignment was to the DBB (A2-B57-DR7) haplotype. Finally, we will discuss how combining the two high quality mole assemblies can be used for benchmarking and novel bioinformatics tool development.

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June 1, 2021  |  

From Sequencing to Chromosomes: New de novo assembly and scaffolding methods improve the goat reference genome

Single-molecule sequencing is now routinely used to assemble complete, high-quality microbial genomes, but these assembly methods have not scaled well to large genomes. To address this problem, we previously introduced the MinHash Alignment Process (MHAP) for overlapping single-molecule reads using probabilistic, locality-sensitive hashing. Integrating MHAP with Celera Assembler (CA) has enabled reference-grade assemblies of model organisms, revealing novel heterochromatic sequences and filling low-complexity gap sequences in the GRCh38 human reference genome. We have applied our methods to assemble the San Clemente goat genome. Combining single-molecule sequencing from Pacific Biosciences and BioNano Genomics generates and assembly that is over 150-fold more contiguous than the latest Capra hircus reference. In combination with Hi-C sequencing, the assembly surpasses reference assemblies, de novo, with minimal manual intervention. The autosomes are each assembled into a single scaffold. Our assembly provides a more complete gene reconstruction, better alignments with Goat 52k chip, and improved allosome reconstruction. In addition to providing increased continuity of sequence, our assembly achieves a higher BUSCO completion score (84%) than the existing goat reference assembly suggesting better quality annotation of gene models. Our results demonstrate that single-molecule sequencing can produce near-complete eukaryotic genomes at modest cost and minimal manual effort.

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June 1, 2021  |  

Immune regions are no longer incomprehensible with SMRT Sequencing

The complex immune regions of the genome, including MHC and KIR, contain large copy number variants (CNVs), a high density of genes, hyper-polymorphic gene alleles, and conserved extended haplotypes (CEH) with enormous linkage disequilibrium (LDs). This level of complexity and inherent biases of short-read sequencing make it challenging for extracting immune region haplotype information from reference-reliant, shotgun sequencing and GWAS methods. As NGS based genome and exome sequencing and SNP arrays have become a routine for population studies, numerous efforts are being made for developing software to extract and or impute the immune gene information from these datasets. Despite these efforts, the fine mapping of causal variants of immune genes for their well-documented association with cancer, drug-induced hypersensitivity and immune-related diseases, has been slower than expected. This has in many ways limited our understanding of the mechanisms leading to immune disease. In the present work, we demonstrate the advantages of long reads delivered by SMRT Sequencing for assembling complete haplotypes of MHC and KIR gene clusters, as well as calling correct genotypes of genes comprised within them. All the genotype information is detected at allele- level with full phasing information across SNP-poor regions. Genotypes were called correctly from targeted gene amplicons, haplotypes, as well as from a completely assembled 5 Mb contig of the MHC region from a de novo assembly of whole genome shotgun data. De novo analysis pipeline used in all these approaches allowed for reference-free analysis without imputation, a key for interrogation without prior knowledge about ethnic backgrounds. These methods are thus easily adoptable for previously uncharacterized human or non-human species.

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June 1, 2021  |  

Highly contiguous de novo human genome assembly and long-range haplotype phasing using SMRT Sequencing

The long reads, random error, and unbiased sampling of SMRT Sequencing enables high quality, de novo assembly of the human genome. PacBio long reads are capable of resolving genomic variations at all size scales, including SNPs, insertions, deletions, inversions, translocations, and repeat expansions, all of which are both important in understanding the genetic basis for human disease, and difficult to access via other technologies. In demonstration of this, we report a new high-quality, diploid-aware de novo assembly of Craig Venter’s well-studied genome.

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June 1, 2021  |  

High-quality human genomes achieved through HiFi sequence data and FALCON-Unzip assembly

De novo assemblies of human genomes from accurate (85-90%), continuous long reads (CLR) now approach the human reference genome in contiguity, but the assembly base pair accuracy is typically below QV40 (99.99%), an order-of-magnitude lower than the standard for finished references. The base pair errors complicate downstream interpretation, particularly false positive indels that lead to false gene loss through frameshifts. PacBio HiFi sequence data, which are both long (>10 kb) and very accurate (>99.9%) at the individual sequence read level, enable a new paradigm in human genome assembly. Haploid human assemblies using HiFi data achieve similar contiguity to those using CLR data and are highly accurate at the base level1. Furthermore, HiFi assemblies resolve more high-identity sequences such as segmental duplications2. To enable HiFi assembly in diploid human samples, we have extended the FALCON-Unzip assembler to work directly with HiFi reads. Here we present phased human diploid genome assemblies from HiFi sequencing of HG002, HG005, and the Vertebrate Genome Project (VGP) mHomSap1 trio on the PacBio Sequel II System. The HiFi assemblies all exceed the VGP’s quality guidelines, approaching QV50 (99.999%) accuracy. For HG002, 60% of the genome was haplotype-resolved, with phase-block N50 of 143Kbp and phasing accuracy of 99.6%. The overall mean base accuracy of the assembly was QV49.7. In conclusion, HiFi data show great promise towards complete, contiguous, and accurate diploid human assemblies.

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February 5, 2021  |  

AGBT 2015 Highlights: Customer interviews day 1

PacBio customers discuss their applications of PacBio SMRT Sequencing and long reads, including Lemuel Racacho (Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute), Matthew Blow (JGI), Yuta Suzuki (U. of Tokyo),…

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April 21, 2020  |  

Telomere-to-telomere assembly of a complete human X chromosome

After nearly two decades of improvements, the current human reference genome (GRCh38) is the most accurate and complete vertebrate genome ever produced. However, no one chromosome has been finished end to end, and hundreds of unresolved gaps persist. The remaining gaps include ribosomal rDNA arrays, large near-identical segmental duplications, and satellite DNA arrays. These regions harbor largely unexplored variation of unknown consequence, and their absence from the current reference genome can lead to experimental artifacts and hide true variants when re-sequencing additional human genomes. Here we present a de novo human genome assembly that surpasses the continuity of GRCh38, along with the first gapless, telomere-to-telomere assembly of a human chromosome. This was enabled by high-coverage, ultra-long-read nanopore sequencing of the complete hydatidiform mole CHM13 genome, combined with complementary technologies for quality improvement and validation. Focusing our efforts on the human X chromosome 3, we reconstructed the ~2.8 megabase centromeric satellite DNA array and closed all 29 remaining gaps in the current reference, including new sequence from the human pseudoautosomal regions and cancer-testis ampliconic gene families (CT-X and GAGE). This complete chromosome X, combined with the ultra-long nanopore data, also allowed us to map methylation patterns across complex tandem repeats and satellite arrays for the first time. These results demonstrate that finishing the human genome is now within reach and will enable ongoing efforts to complete the remaining human chromosomes.

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April 21, 2020  |  

LR_Gapcloser: a tiling path-based gap closer that uses long reads to complete genome assembly.

Completing a genome is an important goal of genome assembly. However, many assemblies, including reference assemblies, are unfinished and have a number of gaps. Long reads obtained from third-generation sequencing (TGS) platforms can help close these gaps and improve assembly contiguity. However, current gap-closure approaches using long reads require extensive runtime and high memory usage. Thus, a fast and memory-efficient approach using long reads is needed to obtain complete genomes.We developed LR_Gapcloser to rapidly and efficiently close the gaps in genome assembly. This tool utilizes long reads generated from TGS sequencing platforms. Tested on de novo assembled gaps, repeat-derived gaps, and real gaps, LR_Gapcloser closed a higher number of gaps faster and with a lower error rate and a much lower memory usage than two existing, state-of-the art tools. This tool utilized raw reads to fill more gaps than when using error-corrected reads. It is applicable to gaps in the assemblies by different approaches and from large and complex genomes. After performing gap-closure using this tool, the contig N50 size of the human CHM1 genome was improved from 143 kb to 19 Mb, a 132-fold increase. We also closed the gaps in the Triticum urartu genome, a large genome rich in repeats; the contig N50 size was increased by 40%. Further, we evaluated the contiguity and correctness of six hybrid assembly strategies by combining the optimal TGS-based and next-generation sequencing-based assemblers with LR_Gapcloser. A proposed and optimal hybrid strategy generated a new human CHM1 genome assembly with marked contiguity. The contig N50 value was greater than 28 Mb, which is larger than previous non-reference assemblies of the diploid human genome.LR_Gapcloser is a fast and efficient tool that can be used to close gaps and improve the contiguity of genome assemblies. A proposed hybrid assembly including this tool promises reference-grade assemblies. The software is available at http://www.fishbrowser.org/software/LR_Gapcloser/.

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