Nucleic Acids Research Paper Presents Single-Cell Sequencing Method for De Novo Assembly

A team of Peking University investigators describes a sequencing protocol for doing de novo genome assembly using single-cell long-read sequencing data. As the team reports in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, it turned to its "single-molecule, real-time sequencing of long fragments amplified through transposon insertion" (SMOOTH-seq) method to help in putting together high-continuity genome assemblies with single-cell whole-genome sequence data generated for a few dozen individual human cells with Pacific Biosciences or Oxford Nanopore sequencing platforms. "[W]e have employed SMOOTH-seq on PacBio HiFi and Oxford Nanopore Technologies platforms to sequence K562 (a human chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) cell line and HG002 (a normal diploid lymphoblast cell line)," the team writes, "and demonstrate the feasibility of genome assembly based on scWGS dataset with different assemblers and rigorous evaluations."