Publications by authors named "R R Wick"
Phylogenetic analyses are crucial for understanding microbial evolution and infectious disease transmission. Bacterial phylogenies are often inferred from SNP alignments, with SNPs as the fundamental signal within these data. SNP alignments can be reduced to a 'strict core' by removing those sites that do not have data present in every sample.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Sequencing DNA directly from patient samples enables faster pathogen characterization compared to traditional culture-based approaches, but often yields insufficient sequence data for effective downstream analysis. CRISPR-Cas9 enrichment is designed to improve the yield of low abundance sequences but has not been thoroughly explored with Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) for use in clinical bacterial epidemiology. We designed CRISPR-Cas9 guide RNAs to enrich the human pathogen , by targeting multi-locus sequence type (MLST) and transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, as well as common antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes and the resistance-associated integron gene .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterpreting the phenotypes of alleles in genomes is complex. Whilst all strains are expected to carry a chromosomal copy conferring resistance to ampicillin, they may also carry mutations in chromosomal alleles or additional plasmid-borne alleles that have extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL) activity and/or β-lactamase inhibitor (BLI) resistance activity. In addition, the role of individual mutations/a changes is not completely documented or understood.
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- Variant calling is crucial for studying bacterial genomics, helping with disease tracking, phylogenetic analysis, and detecting antibiotic resistance.* -
- This study analyzes the accuracy of different variant calling methods using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing data across 14 bacterial species, finding that deep learning-based callers like Clair3 and DeepVariant are notably more effective than traditional ones.* -
- The research highlights that ONT sequencing, especially with high accuracy models, can outperform Illumina sequencing in problematic genomic regions, showing promise for use in settings with limited resources.*
It is now possible to assemble near-perfect bacterial genomes using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) long reads, but short-read polishing is usually required for perfection. However, the effect of short-read depth on polishing performance is not well understood. Here, we introduce Pypolca (with default and careful parameters) and Polypolish v0.
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