Affiliation:
1. Department of Pathology, Division of Medical Microbiology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Next-generation sequencing has evolved as a powerful tool, with applications that extend from diagnosis to public health surveillance and outbreak investigations. Short-read sequencing, using primarily Illumina chemistry, has been the prevailing approach. Single-molecule sensing and long-read sequencing using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) has witnessed a breakthrough in the evolution of the technology, performance, and applications in the past few years. In this issue of the
Journal of Clinical Microbiology
, Bogaerts et al. (
https://doi.org/10.1128/jcm.01576-23
) describe the utility of the latest ONT sequencing technology, the R10.4.1, in bacterial outbreak investigations. The authors demonstrate that ONT R10.4.1 technology can be comparable to Illumina sequencing for single-nucleotide polymorphism-based phylogeny. The authors emphasize that the reproducibility between ONT and Illumina technologies could facilitate collaborations among laboratories utilizing different sequencing platforms for outbreak investigations.
Publisher
American Society for Microbiology