Recent years have seen great progresses in third-generation sequencing. New commercial platforms from Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) can generate ultra-long reads from single-molecule nucleic acid fragments of kilobases up to megabases, exceeding the limitation of short reads and dependency on template amplification suffered by the previous generation of sequencing technologies. Moreover, it can detect epigenetic modifications directly, as well as providing all-around field usage, being pocket-sized and low cost. It has already been applied to yeast research in many aspects, such as complete de novo genome assemblies, the phylogeny of large-brewing yeasts, gene isoform identification, and base modification detection. These applications have delivered novel insights into yeast genomic and transcriptomic analysis.
Keywords: Direct RNA-seq; Fission yeast; Full-length transcripts; Modified bases; Oxford Nanopore Technologies; Single-molecule sequencing; Third-generation sequencing; Ultra-long reads.