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PubMed Central
Article . 2026
License: CC BY NC
Data sources: PubMed Central
Genome Research
Article . 2026 . Peer-reviewed
Data sources: Crossref
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Assessing the readiness of Oxford Nanopore sequencing for clinical genomics applications

Authors: Judith Arres; Santosh Elavalli; Shalini Behl; Daniel Matias Sanchez; Ayesha Al Ali; Abdelrahman Ahmed Yehia Abdelaziz Saad; Azza Attia; +21 Authors

Assessing the readiness of Oxford Nanopore sequencing for clinical genomics applications

Abstract

Long-read sequencing (LRS) technologies, namely, Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) and Pacific Biosciences (PacBio), have emerged as promising solutions to overcome the limitations of short-read sequencing (SRS). Nevertheless, the still higher sequencing error rates compared with SRS, need for customized pipelines, rapidly updating software, and incipient scalability continue to present challenges for adopting ONT in standard clinical practice. Here we assess the performance of ONT (R9 and R10 chemistries) in comparison to Illumina and MGI across 17 well-characterized reference samples with 11 clinical variants representing nine different genetic diseases. To enable this, we have implemented a production-ready pipeline including SNV, indel, STR, SV, and CNV detection, alongside reporting key summary metrics to ensure high-quality data at the production sequencing level. Our results show high accuracy of ONT across SNVs ( F -score 0.978–0.983) and SVs ( F -score = 0.75) but still weaknesses across indels ( F -score 0.659–0.758). However, we highlight that ONT accurately detected all four pathogenic indels as well as the performance improvement in exons and with the newer R10 chemistry. We further demonstrated the importance of long reads to detect clinically impactful variants such as a FMR1 pathogenic expansion, often misclassified by SRS as being in the premutation range. Our multiplatform analysis and Sanger validation uncovered a 1 bp error in the Coriell annotation for a cystic fibrosis–causing indel in GM07829. This work underscores the growing readiness of ONT for clinical applications, highlighting both its advancements and its potential for broader adoption in clinical genomics and large-scale operations.

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Keywords

Nanopore Sequencing, INDEL Mutation, Research, Humans, High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing, Genomics, Sequence Analysis, DNA

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
1
Top 10%
Average
Average
Green