High contiguity Arabidopsis thaliana genome assembly with a single nanopore flow cell (Nature Comms)

Every now and then a technology arrives on the scene that suddenly makes everything easier. When I was a student, PCR was developed. More recently, CRISPR/Cas9 applications were developed, and now the hot tool is nanopore flow cell sequencing. The crucial advancement in this method is that rather than sequencing thousands of short sequences and having to find overlaps and paste them together, much longer strands (>200 kb) can be read. Michael et al. describe the use of this technology to sequence an Arabidopsis genome. They demonstrate that this method can “rapidly and inexpensively resolve structural variation (SV) at a quantitative trait locus (QTL) in A. thaliana.” (Summary by Mary Williams) Nature Comms. 10.1038/s41467-018-03016-2