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Invention Summary:
Mycobacterium tuberculosis infects a quarter of the world's population and was the second leading infectious disease killer after SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. The H37Rv strain of M. tuberculosis is widely used in laboratory experiments, but current genome assembly tools are unreliable and lack consistency.
Rutgers researchers have integrated an algorithm called Bact-Builder to address this gap. The novel pipeline uses consensus building to generate highly accurate gap-closed bacterial genomes from raw sequencing data. This novel pipeline has been tested to provide ~100% accuracy and reproducibility when sequencing three separate H37Rv cultures, as well as the ability of the assembly tool to reveal ~6.4 kb of new sequence that is absent from in the GenBank. .
Market Applications:
- Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) detection
- Phylogenetic studies
- Construction of new reference sequences
- Variant analysis
- Meta-genomic and pan-genomic studies.
Advantages:
- Generates highly accurate genomes using existing programs.
- Open-source and easy to use via singularity containers.
- Can assemble raw sequencing reads into a polished genome with 50x genome coverage.
- Final genomes are gap-closed and highly reproducible.
- Outputs can be used for various downstream applications such as new reference sequences, reference-based assembly, RNAseq, TnSeq, and meta-genomic and pan-genomic studies.
Intellectual Property & Development Status: Looking for research and business collaboration. For any business development and other collaborative partnerships contact: marketingbd@research.rutgers.edu
