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

Bioinformatics. 2022 Mar 28;38(7):2033-2035. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac043.

Abstract

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 sequencing pipeline to analyze the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens. 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.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19*
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
  • Humans
  • Nanopore Sequencing*
  • Phylogeny
  • SARS-CoV-2 / genetics
  • Software
  • Zika Virus Infection*
  • Zika Virus*