As I noted in this Twitter exchange, plasmid nanopore sequencing via Plasmidsaurus is great, but not perfect. For example, there seem to be some “achilles heal” sequences, where nanopore reproducibly (like 100% of the time with different plasmid submissions) miscalls certain parts of our plasmids. How do we know they’re miscalls? B/c the Sanger traces of the same exact plasmids show the expected sequence very clearly. Here are two that we commonly see:

A single deleted C nucleotide in the beginning of our IRES sequence:

A phantom T>C base miscall that incorrectly tells us we have a W566R nonsynonymous change in every single one of our human ACE2 constructs.

Both are related to C repeats, but there are plenty of other C repeats in the plasmids we submit and it’s ALWAYS these sequences that give Plasmidsaurus problems. Once I figured this one, it’s really NBD, since I know to ignore these changes, although it did inform our current molecular biology workflow in the lab of 1) Screen colony minipreps via Sanger -> 2) Sequence candidate good constructs with Plasmidsaurus / nanopore -> 3) Sanger to resolve unexpected discrepancies between the expected / intended and Plasmidsaurus sequences.