Skoltech scientists Dmitrii Lukyanov and Ilya Osterman have co-authored a paper “Nanopore Sequencing for De Novo Bacterial Genome Assembly and Search for Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism” that has been published in International Journal of Molecular Sciences. The researchers applied Nanopore sequencing technology (ONT) in the assembly of an E. coli genome characterized by a deletion of the tolC gene and known single-nucleotide variations leading to antibiotic resistance, in the absence of a reference genome. They determined minimum coverage depth to obtain a complete genome, depending on the quality of the ONT data. When using high-quality samples with an average read length of 8 Kbp or more, the coverage depth of 30× is sufficient to assemble the complete genome de novo and reliably determine single-nucleotide variations in it. For samples with shorter reads with mean lengths of 2 Kbp, a higher coverage depth of 50× is required. Full text of the paper is available here.