High-Quality Genomes of Nanopore Sequencing by Homologous Polishing

Nanopore sequencing has been widely used for reconstruction of a variety of microbial genomes. Owing to the higher error rate, the assembled genome requires further error correction. Existing methods erase many of these errors via deep neural network trained from Nanopore reads. However, quite a few systematic errors are still left on the genome. This paper proposed a new model trained from homologous sequences extracted from closely-related genomes, which provides valuable features missed in Nanopore reads. The developed program (called Homopolish) outperforms the state-of-the-art Racon/Medaka and MarginPolish/HELEN pipelines in metagenomic and isolates of bacteria, viruses and fungi. When Homopolish is combined with Medaka or with HELEN, the genomes quality can exceed Q50 on R9.4 flowcells. The genome quality can be also improved on R10.3 flowcells (Q50-Q90). We proved that Nanopore-only sequencing can now produce high-quality genomes without the need of Illumina hybrid sequencing.