Speaker
Description
Widespread surveillance, rapid detection and appropriate intervention will be critical for successful eradication of poliovirus. With deployable next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches, the time from sample to result can be significantly reduced compared to cell culture and Sanger sequencing. We developed piranha (poliovirus investigation resource automating nanopore haplotype analysis), a ‘sequencing reads-to-report’ solution to aid routine poliovirus testing of both stool and environmental samples and alleviate the bioinformatic bottleneck that often exists for labs adopting novel NGS approaches. Piranha can be used for efficient intratypic differentiation of poliovirus serotypes, for classification of Sabin-like polioviruses and for detection of wild-type and vaccine derived polioviruses. It produces interactive, distributable html reports, as well as summary csv files and consensus poliovirus FASTA sequences. Piranha can run best-practice phylogenetic analysis, with the ability to incorporate a local database, processing from raw sequencing reads to an interactive, annotated phylogeny in a single user step. The reports describe each nanopore sequencing run with interpretable plots enabling researchers to easily detect the presence of poliovirus in samples and quickly disseminate their results. Poliovirus eradication efforts are currently hindered by lack of real-time detection and reporting, but introduction of next-generation sequencing methods alongside piranha analytics allows results to be rapidly disseminated.
