Recent advances in microbial genome sequencing

Abstract

Microbes play significant roles in environmental ecological balance and human health. Microbes are associated with infection and immunity in humans. The microbial culturing and analysis has improved over the course of period with the advent of DNA sequencing technology. Since first bacterial genome of bacterium Haemophilus was sequenced by using Sanger method almost 20 years back, DNA sequencing technology has advanced drastically in capability and applications. With advances in next-generation sequencing technology involving improvement in the chemistry, increase in the output and quality of data, microbial genome sequencing has become an affordable approach to do comprehensive microbial analysis. The next-generation sequencing methods are more advanced and data throughput in a typical NGS method is about 100-fold higher compared to Sanger sequencing. The next-generation sequencing technology has revolutionized fields of genetics, genomics, microbiology, and clinical microbiology. Now whole genome microbial sequencing can be performed within few hours. With the thirdgeneration sequencing like single-molecule sequencing, the possibility of having more of complete microbial genomes has increased. Analysis of complete genome sequences would provide a great insight about microbial diversity, virulence, evolution of microbes, and host-pathogen interactions. In this chapter, the recent advancements in the field of microbial genome sequencing have been discussed.