A complete bacterial genome assembled de novo using only nanopore sequencing data

By error-correcting long nanopore reads and calling a consensus sequence using nanopore signal data, an entire bacterial genome is assembled de novo. We have assembled de novo the Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655 chromosome in a single 4.6-Mb contig using only nanopore data. Our method has three stages: (i) overlaps are detected between reads and then corrected by a multiple-alignment process; (ii) corrected reads are assembled using the Celera Assembler; and (iii) the assembly is polished using a probabilistic model of the signal-level data. The assembly reconstructs gene order and has 99.5% nucleotide identity.