Tonight I watched the PAG Industry Workshop Oxford Nanopore Technologies offered on January 14, 2025. In this session, Aaron Pomerantz presented updates along with Sean Mckenzie that improve assemblies. The title of the session is “New assemblers enable unprecedented de novo genome and metagenome contiguity and completeness…” The series of talks include amplicon to massive sequencing projects. Pomerantz spoke about how Nanopore sequencing works. DNA, RNA, and modified bases can be sequenced directly. They shared data on the number of genomes (plant and animal) sequenced using the technology. High quality telomere-to-telomere assemblies can be achieved using ONT. Pomerantz also spoke about the Org.one program that is supported by ONT and focuses on on-site capacity building. Pomerantz also described the Nanopore-only microbial isolate sequencing solution (NO-MISS) that ONT developed and we use in the course BIT 295. Some of the errors in bacterial genomes had to do with methylation! Training on prokaryotes helped improve the models. Full-length 16S rRNA sequencing with ONT enables species-level microbial community profiling. Sean Mckenzie spoke about improvements in metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). The metaMDBG tool was tested with a complex metagenome with the Zymo fecal microbiome standard. The team used SemiBin2 to recover metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) after assembly with metaMDBG. Even with bead beating from some Gram negative organism DNA recovery, the number of MAGs per flow cell was above that of other platforms. Tools for assembly of plants and animal genomes have improved. Pre-assembly correction tools are improving T2T assembly. The different instruments available from ONT were displayed highlighting the PromethION devices. I always learn something new from watching these updates!
