Evaluating Oxford Nanopore Technologies R10.4.1 flow cells and v14 library prep kits for Gram negative bacteria

The best whole genome assemblies are currently built from a combination of highly accurate short-read sequencing data and long-read sequencing data that can bridge repetitive and problematic regions. Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) machines produce long-read data and the company is continually improving their technology to obtain higher-quality data that is approaching the quality of data obtained from short-read sequencing platforms such as Illumina. As these innovations continue, we were interested in evaluating how much ONT read coverage produced by the Rapid Barcoding Kit v14 is necessary to generate high-quality hybrid and long-read-only genome assemblies for a panel of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacterales bacterial isolates.