ONTdeCIPHER: An amplicon-based nanopore sequencing pipeline for tracking pathogen variants

Cherif, Emira; Thiam, Fatou Seck; Salma, Mohammad; Rivera-Ingraham, Georgina; Justy, Fabienne; Deremarque, Theo; Breugnot, Damien; Doudou, Jean-Claude; Gozlan, Rodolphe Elie; Combe, Marine

Motivation Amplicon-based nanopore sequencing is increasingly used for molecular surveillance during epidemics (e.g. ZIKA, EBOLA) or pandemics (e.g. SARS-CoV-2). However, there is still a lack of versatile and easy-to-use tools that allow users with minimal bioinformatics skills to perform the main steps of downstream analysis, from quality testing to SNPs effect to phylogenetic analysis. Results Here, we present ONTdeCIPHER, an amplicon-based Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) sequencing pipeline to analyze the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogenes. Our pipeline integrates 13 bioinformatics tools. With a single command line and a simple configuration file, users can pre-process their data and obtain the sequencing statistics, reconstruct the consensus genome, identify variants and their effects for each viral isolate, infer lineage and, finally perform multi-sequence alignments and phylogenetic analyses. Availability and implementation: ONTdeCIPHER is available at https://github.com/emiracherif/ONTdeCIPHER Contact [e-mail] Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at …