A new review in Nucleic Acids Research offers a sweeping look at clinical uses for SMRT Sequencing, concluding: “The myth that SMRT sequencing is too error prone to be diagnostically useful is being expunged and replaced by evidence that it offers advantages over short-read sequencers.” The authors continued, “Just as second-generation platforms stepped beyond Sanger sequencing and enabled a revolution in genomics medicine, third-generation single molecule sequencing platforms will likely be the next genetic diagnostic revolution.” “Single molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing comes of age: applications and utilities for medical diagnostics” written by Simon Ardui, Joris Vermeesch, and Matthew Hestand at KU Leuven…
In an unprecedented crowd-sourced effort stoked by social media, 72 scientists collaborated via 25 conference calls and 3,323 emails to produce a new high-quality Aedes aegypti mosquito genome. Assembled using PacBio long-read sequencing, the resource could provide the DNA map researchers need to combat the pest and the infectious diseases it spreads, including Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Eager to share the results with the scientific community, lead author Leslie B. Vosshall, first author Benjamin Matthews, both of Rockefeller University, and colleagues at several other institutions, published a pre-print of their paper, “Improved Aedes aegypti mosquito reference genome assembly…
[caption id="attachment_21181" align="alignright" width="287"] Courtesy of NIAID[/caption] In a recent paper, scientists in Germany call for a genomic database of Klebsiella pneumoniae strains to accelerate strain identification as well as drug-resistance status. To that end, they used SMRT Sequencing to generate high-quality assemblies for 16 isolates collected in German hospitals. “Monitoring microevolution of OXA-48-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae ST147 in a hospital setting by SMRT sequencing” comes from lead authors Andreas Zautner and Boyke Bunk, senior authors Jorg Overmann and Wolfgang Bohne, and collaborators at University Medical Center and other institutes in Germany. The urgency to characterize K. pneumoniae strains comes from…
A new publication reports the discovery and analysis of a nightmare bacterium that’s genetically resistant to all commercially available classes of antibiotics. The paper, “Stepwise evolution of pandrug-resistance in Klebsiella pneumonia,” came out this month in Scientific Reports from Nature. Lead authors Hosam Zowawi and Brian Forde, along with senior author David Paterson and several collaborators, studied an isolate recovered from the urine of an 87-year-old patient who was hospitalized in the United Arab Emirates last year. They used SMRT Sequencing to characterize the strain and its genetic mechanisms for drug resistance. That strain, MS6671, “was found to be non-susceptible to…