Advances in Simple Sequencing, NGS and WGS: from Cancer to Oleaginous Yeast and to COVID-19

Objective: Until recently, the whole-genome-sequencing (WGS) results for the new strains and organisms weren’t devoid of errors, and individual coding sequences from each contig had to be revisited and re-deposited based on the mRNA sequence.

Developed to detect somatic mutations in cancer patients, the next-generation sequencing (NGS) approach substantially decreased the error rate, and it was then applied to the sequencing of new or frequently mutating genomes including the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Sequence assembly of novel oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica strain also showed the usefulness of NGS in the new-strain sequencing. Hence, previously, the oleic-acid utilizing yeast led to the discovery of novel transcription factors and they also proved to be useful in testing the chemical libraries.

Conclusions: The advances in genome sequencing including NGS and emerging long-read sequencing (LRS) technologies are constantly improving the characterization of genetic variants. Some alternative bioinformatics tools are described in this review.