Mads Albertsen│Genome centric metagenomics in the long read era

Microbial communities underpin all processes in the environment and have a direct impact on human health. However, despite their importance, only a tiny fraction of the millions of different microbes is known. This is mainly due to the immense difficulties of cultivating microbes from natural systems in the laboratory.
The current standard approach to retrieve individual microbial genomes from complex samples is to use short-read sequencing (Illumina; approx. 2 x 125 bp) of multiple related samples combined with metagenomic differential coverage binning approaches. However, retrieving individual bacterial genomes from complex microbial communities is extremely challenging using short reads, due to the existence of multiple closely related strains. In this talk, I will share our experience in using high-throughput long-read data from Oxford Nanopore to recover individual genomes from complex metagenomes.

Flongle, GridION, MinION, MinIT, PromethION, and VolTRAX are currently for research use only.