Benchmarking of real-time, field-deployable wholegenome sequencing of Plasmodium falciparum using Nanopore technology

Abstract

Malaria parasite genomes have been generated predominantly using Illumina short-read sequencing that requires expensive equipment, is time-consuming with complex protocols, and does not adequately interrogate complex genomic regions that harbour important malaria virulence determinants. The portable Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION platform generates long reads in real time and may overcome these limitations. We present compelling evidence that Nanopore sequencing delivers valuable additional information for malaria parasites with similar data fidelity for single nucleotide variant (SNV) calls compared to standard Illumina whole-genome sequencing. We demonstrate this through sequencing of..