Distilled Single Cell Genome Sequencing and De Novo Assembly for Sparse Microbial Communities

Zeinab Taghavi, Narjes S. Movahedi, Sorin Draghici, Hamidreza Chitsaz
(Submitted on 1 May 2013)

Identification of all species in a microbial sample is an important and challenging task with crucial applications. It is challenging because there are typically millions of cells in a microbial sample, the vast majority of which elude cultivation. The most accurate method to date is exhaustive single cell sequencing using multiple displacement amplification, which is simply intractable for a large number of cells. However, there is hope for breaking this barrier as the number of different species is usually much smaller than the number of cells. Here, we present a novel divide-and-conquer method to sequence and de novo assemble the genomes of all of the different species present in a microbial sample with a sequencing cost and computational complexity proportional to the number of species, not the number of cells. The method is implemented in a tool called Squeezambler. We evaluated Squeezambler on simulated data. The proposed divide-and-conquer method successfully reduces the cost of sequencing in comparison with the naive exhaustive approach.