A universal and independent synthetic DNA ladder for the quantitative measurement of genomic features

Standard units of measurement are required for the quantitative description of nature; however, few standard units have been established for genomics to date. Here, we have developed a synthetic DNA ladder that defines a quantitative standard unit that can measure DNA sequence abundance within a nex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2020-07, Vol.11 (1), p.3609-3609, Article 3609
Main Authors: Reis, Andre L. M., Deveson, Ira W., Wong, Ted, Madala, Bindu Swapna, Barker, Chris, Blackburn, James, Marcellin, Esteban, Mercer, Tim R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
45/23
631/114/2415
631/114/2416
631/1647/514/2254
631/208/212
631/208/2489/1512
Abundance
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
DNA sequencing
Genetic diversity
Genetics
Genomes
Humanities and Social Sciences
Libraries
Microorganisms
multidisciplinary
Next-generation sequencing
Nucleotide sequence
Quantitative genetics
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Units of measurement
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Summary:Standard units of measurement are required for the quantitative description of nature; however, few standard units have been established for genomics to date. Here, we have developed a synthetic DNA ladder that defines a quantitative standard unit that can measure DNA sequence abundance within a next-generation sequencing library. The ladder can be spiked into a DNA sample, and act as an internal scale that measures quantitative genetics features. Unlike previous spike-ins, the ladder is encoded within a single molecule, and can be equivalently and independently synthesized by different laboratories. We show how the ladder can measure diverse quantitative features, including human genetic variation and microbial abundance, and also estimate uncertainty due to technical variation and improve normalization between libraries. This ladder provides an independent quantitative unit that can be used with any organism, application or technology, thereby providing a common metric by which genomes can be measured. Standard units of measurement are required for a quantitative description of the genome. Here, the authors present a universal synthetic DNA ladder that can measure genetic abundance in next-generation sequencing libraries.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-020-17445-5