PacBio Experiences at Norwegian Sequencing Center

An informative blog post from Lex on PacBio experience -

At the Norwegian Sequencing Centre,with which I am affiliated, we recently received several bacterial genome DNA samples for PacBio sequencing. Given our very positive first experiences with size selecting PacBio libraries using the BluePippin, see my previous post, we decided to use this instrument also for these samples. Four of the samples yielded very nice libraries, which were sequenced, two SMRTcells each, on our (recently upgraded) PacBio RSII instrument.

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Wow, mostly one laaarge contig (and I checked, these are without N bases) and a few shorter ones. The exception was the last strain which assembled into a few large pieces, that together, according to what I understand, are too large. A further step for this assembly is trying the Minimus2 tool, to see whether there is enough overlap between the contigs to further reduce their number a step generally recommended for HGAp assemblies. I havent tried this yet for this assembly.

Unlike other bloggers, who leave you with happy/sad/angry feeling, a moral/immoral/amoral lesson or simply informed/misinformed, Lex leaves you with a homework :)

The bottleneck of the HGAp process was the two consensus calling steps: when the consensus of the longest reads are being called (based on the mapped shortest ones), and especially for the Celera contig consensus calling. The latter takes one contig at a time, and since these now are becoming millions of basepairs long, this can take up many hours, perhaps even half the total assembly time. By the way, overlapping the error-corrected reads was done in minutes So, if someone is interested in developing a parallelised consensus caller, than can work with parts of a long contigs, and stitch the consensi back together when done, we bioinformaticians doing HGAP would be very grateful

Enjoy.