Approaches to mitochondrial genome sequencing using the oxford nanopore minion device

Current DNA sequencing methods rely on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to create sufficient copies of targeted DNA fragments to serve as a library. PCR and subsequent clean-up steps add considerable time and cost to the process and provide opportunity for introduction of amplification errors or contamination. The aim of this study was to develop a reliable method for mitochondrial genome sequencing sans PCR using the Oxford Nanopore MinION. Our hypothesis was that results generated from native DNA sequencing would be concordant to sequencing results generated from PCR-enriched libraries. Error-rates of 1.47% (enriched) and 1.26% (native) were observed when sequencing the control DNA. Consensus sequences generated from native and PCR-enriched libraries show an average of 98.7% identity between the two methods.