Nano-GLADIATOR: real-time detection of copy number alterations from nanopore sequencing data

Motivation: The past few years have seen the emergence of nanopore-based sequencing technologies which interrogate single molecule of DNA and generate reads sequentially.

Results: In this paper, we demonstrate that, thanks to the sequentiality of the nanopore process, the data generated in the first tens of minutes of a typical MinION/GridION run can be exploited to resolve the alterations of a human genome at a karyotype level with a resolution in the order of tens of Mb, while the data produced in the first 6-12 h allow to obtain a resolution comparable to currently available array-based technologies, and thanks to a novel probabilistic approach are capable to predict the allelic fraction of genomic alteration with high accuracy. To exploit the unique characteristics of nanopore sequencing data we developed a novel software tool, Nano-GLADIATOR, that is capable to perform copy number variants/alterations detection and allelic fraction prediction during the sequencing run ('On-line' mode) and after experiment completion ('Off-line' mode). We tested Nano-GLADIATOR on publicly available ('Off-line' mode) and on novel whole genome sequencing dataset generated with MinION device ('On-line' mode) showing that our tool is capable to perform real-time copy number alterations detection obtaining good results with respect to other state-of-the-art tools.

Availability and implementation: Nano-GLADIATOR is freely available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/nanogladiator/.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.