Decoding complexity: The role of long-read sequencing in unraveling genetic disease etiologies.

In recent years, next-generation high-throughput sequencing technology has been widely used in clinical practice for the identification and diagnosis of Mendelian diseases as an auxiliary detection method. Nevertheless, due to the limitations in read length and poor coverage of complex genomic regions, the etiology of many genetic diseases is unclear. Long-read sequencing (LRS) addresses these limitations of next-generation sequencing. LRS is an effective tool for the clinical study of the etiology of complex genetic diseases. In this review, we summarized the current research on the application of LRS in diseases across various systems. We also reported the improvements in the diagnostic rate and common variant types of LRS in different studies, providing a foundation for the discovery of new disease mechanisms, which is anticipated to play a crucial role in future research on genetic diseases.