A complete high quality nanopore-only assembly of an XDR Mycobacterium tuberculosis Beijing lineage strain identifies novel variation in repetitive PE/PPE gene regions

Abstract

A better understanding of the genomic changes that facilitate the emergence and spread of drug resistant M. tuberculosis strains is required. Short-read sequencing methods have limited capacity to identify long, repetitive genomic regions and gene duplications. We sequenced an extensively drug resistant (XDR) Beijing sub-lineage 2.2.1.1 “epidemic strain” from the Western Province of Papua New Guinea using long-read sequencing (Oxford Nanopore MinION®). With up to 274 fold coverage from a single flow-cell, we assembled a 4404947bp circular genome containing 3670 coding sequences that include the highly repetitive PE/PPE genes. Comparison with Illumina reads indicated a base-level accuracy of ..