| description |
As genomic sequencing can greatly facilitate public health efforts to identify and characterize the infectious agent as well as to contain and monitor an epidemic, our research team was deployed to undertake real-time sequencing using the Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION™ sequencer in support of the local diagnostic teams during the May 2018 Ebola virus outbreak in the Equateur province of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As a pilot study, we investigated a confirmed Ebola-positive blood sample from the May 2017 Likati outbreak at the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB), Kinshasa. The sample, collected on 7 May 2017, originated from a 22-year-old male (onset of disease 30 April 2017, deceased 8 May 2017). Here, we present the complete genome sequence of this Ebola virus isolate, obtained using MinION™ sequencer. We were able to generate results in less than 24 hours, with the sequencing workflow started from the viral RNA extraction to raw MinION data generation. |