Supporting data for "Assessment of the cPAS-based BGISEQ-500 platform for metagenomic sequencing"

More extensive use of metagenomic shotgun sequencing in microbiome research relies on the development of high-throughput, cost-effective sequencing. Here we present a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of the new high-throughput sequencing platform BGISEQ-500 for metagenomic shotgun sequencing and compare its performance with that of two Illumina platforms.
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Using fecal samples from 20 healthy individuals we evaluated the intra-platform reproducibility for metagenomic sequencing on the BGISEQ-500 platform in a setup comprising 8 library replicates and 8 sequencing replicates. Cross-platform consistency, was evaluated by comparing 20 pairwise replicates on the BGISEQ-500 platform versus the Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform and the Illumina HiSeq 4000 platform. In addition, we compared the performance of the two Illumina platforms against each other.
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By a newly developed overall accuracy quality control method, an average of 82.45 million high quality reads (96.06% of raw reads) per sample with 90.56% of bases scoring Q30 and above was obtained using the BGISEQ-500 platform. Quantitative analyses revealed extremely high reproducibility between BGISEQ-500 intra-platform replicates. Cross-platform replicates differed slightly more than intra-platform replicates, yet a high consistency was observed. Only a low percentage (2.02% -3.25%) of genes exhibited significant differences in relative abundance comparing the BGISEQ-500 and HiSeq platforms, with a bias towards genes with higher GC content being enriched on the HiSeq platforms.
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Our study provides the first set of performance metrics for human gut metagenomic sequencing data using BGISEQ-500. The high accuracy and technical reproducibility confirm the applicability of the new platform for metagenomic studies, though caution is still warranted when combining metagenomic data from different platforms.