Return to search

De Novo Sequence Assembly of Viral Quasispecies

The rapid replication and high mutation rates of viruses like HIV lead to the formation of a community of highly similar genomes, referred to as a viral quasispecies, in an infected individual. Next-generation sequencing technologies enable researchers to sequence a complete quasispecies community with reduced expense and effort compared to traditional sequencing methods. However, typical sequence assembly software is designed to reconstruct a single genome from sequencing reads rather than a community of highly similar genomes.

We describe and implement a de novo assembly method for reconstructing variants from a quasispecies community using de Bruijn graphs and a novel, heuristic path-construction method designed to identify corresponding variations at long distances across the genome. We predict the relative abundance of reconstructed variants using an approach inspired from Markov chains.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/9591
Date23 October 2012
CreatorsBristow, Franklin
ContributorsVan Domselaar, Gary (Computer Science) Domaratzki, Michael (Computer Science), Cameron, Helen (Computer Science) Ball, Blake (Medical Micriobiology)
Source SetsUniversity of Manitoba Canada
Detected LanguageEnglish

Page generated in 0.0029 seconds