@article {Ben{\'\i}tez-P{\'a}ez021758, author = {Alfonso Ben{\'\i}tez-P{\'a}ez and Kevin Portune and Yolanda Sanz}, title = {Species level resolution of 16S rRNA gene amplicons sequenced through MinION{\texttrademark} portable nanopore sequencer}, elocation-id = {021758}, year = {2015}, doi = {10.1101/021758}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {The miniaturized and portable DNA sequencer MinIONTM has been released to the scientific community in the framework of an early access programme to evaluate its scope in a wide variety of genetic approaches. Although this technology is under constant development to completely deliver error-free and high quality reads, it has demonstrated a great potential especially in wide-genome analyses. In this study, we tested the ability of the MinIONTM to perform amplicon sequencing in order to design new approaches to study microbial diversity using nearly full-length 16S rDNA sequences.Using the R7.3 chemistry, we have generated more than 3.8 million events (nt) during a sequencing run. Such data was enough to reconstruct more than 90\% of the 16S rRNA gene sequences for 20 different species present in the mock community used as a reference. After read mapping and 16S rRNA gene assembly, we could recover consensus sequences useful to make taxonomy assignments at the species level. Additionally, we could measure the relative abundance of all the species present in the mock community by detecting a homogeneous distribution for most of the species as expected.Despite the nanopore-based sequencing produces reads with lower per-base accuracy in comparison with platforms such as Illumina and 454, promising results were obtained from MinIONTM, indicating that this technology is helpful to perform microbial diversity analysis. With the imminent improvement of the nanopore chemistry, better results and global performance of the platform are expected to contribute to the specific detection of microbial species and strains in complex ecosystems.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/01/021758}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/01/021758.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }