Nanopore native RNA-seq for genome-wide identification of transcription units and transcriptional termination sites in the phytopathogen Dickeya dadantii 3937. Nanopore native RNA-seq for genome-wide identification of transcription units and transcriptional termination sites in the phytopathogen Dickeya dadantii 3937

In this study, based on Nanopore direct RNA-seq where native RNAs are sequenced directly as near full-length transcripts in the 3' to 5' direction, transcription units of the phytopathogen Dickeya dadantii 3937 were validated and transcriptional termination sites were determined. Briefly, D. dadantii cultures were grown in M63 medium supplemented with 0.2% glucose and 0.2% PGA, until the early exponential phase (A600nm = 0.2, condition 1), or the early stationary phase (A600nm = 1.8, condition 2). RNAs were extracted using a frozen acid-phenol method, as previously described (Hommais et al. 2008), and treated successively with Roche and Biolabs DNases. Two samples were prepared: 50 µg of RNAs from each condition were pulled into one sample (sample 1), whereas the other one contained 100 µg of RNAs from condition 2 (sample 2). Both samples were then supplied to Vertis Biotechnologie AG for Nanopore native RNA-seq: total RNA preparations were first examined by capillary electrophoresis. For sample 1, ribosomal RNA molecules were depleted using an in-house developed protocol (recovery rate = 84%), whereas no ribodepletion was performed for sample 2. 3' ends of RNA were then poly(A)-tailed using poly(A) polymerase, and the Direct RNA sequencing kit (SQK-RNA002) was used to prepare the library for 1D sequencing on the Oxford Nanopore sequencing device. The direct RNA libraries were sequenced on a MinION device (MIN-101B) using standard settings. Basecalling of the fast5 files was performed using Guppy (version 3.6.1) with the following settings: --flowcell FLO-MIN106 --kit SQK-RNA002 --cpu_threads_per_caller 12--compress_fastq --reverse_sequence true --trim_strategy rna. Reads smaller than 50 nt were removed. 466 393 and 556 850 reads were generated for sample 1 and 2, respectively.