Long-read Sequencing Reveals an Expansive Transcriptome in Influenza-infected Human Airway Organoids

Summary: Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) are advantageous sequencing devices because they generate long reads that represent the full length of transcripts in the read pool. Here RNA was extracted from Influenza A pH1N1 infected lung organoids and sequenced using both Illumina NovaSeq 600 and the ONT MinION device. A comparison of datasets reveals a .89 correlation in regulation of genes identified by both methods. This comparison demonstrates that ONT replicates Illumina findings with a high degree of accuracy, while offering the benefit of long read capability allowing for the analysis of differential isoform usage.