Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

The rise of antimicrobial-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae is a significant public health concern. Against this background, rapid culture-independent diagnostics may allow targeted treatment and prevent onward transmission. We have previously shown metagenomic sequencing of urine samples from men with urethral gonorrhea can recover near-complete N. gonorrhoeae genomes. However, disentangling the N. gonorrhoeae genome from metagenomic samples and robustly identifying antimicrobial resistance determinants from error-prone Nanopore sequencing is a substantial bioinformatics challenge. Here, we show an N. gonorrhoeae diagnostic workflow for analysis of metagenomic sequencing data obtained from clinical samples using R9.4.1 Nanopore sequencing. We compared results from simulated and clinical infections with data from known reference strains and Illumina sequencing of isolates cultured from the same patients. We evaluated three Nanopore variant callers and developed a random forest classifier to filter called SNPs. Clair was the most suitable variant caller after SNP filtering. A minimum depth of 20× reads was required to confidently identify resistant determinants over the entire genome. Our findings show that metagenomic Nanopore sequencing can provide reliable diagnostic information in N. gonorrhoeae infection.

Original publication

DOI

10.1101/gr.262865.120

Type

Journal article

Journal

Genome Res

Publication Date

09/2020

Volume

30

Pages

1354 - 1363