First Identification of Human Adenovirus Subtype 21a in China With MinION and Illumina Sequencers

Ye, Fuqiang; Han, Yifang; Zhu, Juanjuan; Li, Peng; Zhang, Qi; Lin, Yanfeng; Wang, Taiwu; Lv, Heng; Wang, Changjun; Wang, Chunhui; Zhang, Jinhai

Nanopore sequencing technology has an advantage of extremely long-read output (>2.3 Mb according to ONT website) over current NGS platforms. This characteristic has promoted rapid identification of pathogens in the field (McIntyre et al., 2016; Castro-Wallace et al., 2017; Johnson et al., 2017; Edwards et al., 2019) , especially for bacteria and viruses. Human adenoviruses usually have 35-36 kb in their genomes, which could be captured and covered by ONT with a single read. There were 21 MinION reads longer than 30 kb, 20 of which could be identified as HAdV21a with a genome coverage ≥82.27%. These reads were produced in 54 min to ∼15.5 h after the start of sequencing, with eight (40%) generated in ≤2.5 h. This demonstrated the feasibility of nanopore technology in the rapid detection of HAdV, thus providing key information for disease control and treatment.