A hybridization target enrichment approach for pathogen genomics

Emerging infectious diseases require continuous pathogen monitoring. Rapid clinical diagnosis by nucleic acid amplification is limited to a small number of targets and may miss target detection due to new mutations in clinical isolates. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) identifies genome-wide variations that may be used to determine a pathogen's drug resistance patterns and phylogenetically characterize isolates to track disease origin and transmission. WGS is typically performed using DNA isolated from cultured clinical isolates. Culturing clinical specimens increases turn-around time and may not be possible for fastidious bacteria. To overcome some of these limitations, direct sequencing of clinical specimens has been attempted using expensive capture probes to enrich the entire genomes of target pathogens. We present a method to produce a cost-effective, time-efficient, and large-scale synthesis of probes for whole-genome enrichment. We envision that our method can be used for direct clinical sequencing of a wide range of microbial pathogens for genomic epidemiology.