“Untangling heterogeneity in DNA replication with nanopore sequencing” was the title of the London Calling 2019 session that Michael Boemo from the University of Oxford in the UK presented. Boemo spoke about how genome replication has been studied on average and not individual cases. DNA replication can be studied with next-generation sequencing methods to identify positions on the chromosome where replication is occurring. Boemo and the team hypothesized that using BrdU incorporation can be detected with Oxford Nanopore Technologies. The researchers took a series of training substrates to identify BrdU incorporation near origins. Fork direction and velocity can be inferred from the data generated. Boemo explained that with this method, whole genome maps of DNA replication can be created. Boemo published the method in Nature Methods, and the software is available on GitHub.
