Implementation of long-read sequencing for routine molecular diagnosis of familial mediterranean fever

Long-read sequencing technology, widely used in research, is proving useful in clinical diagnosis, especially for infectious diseases. Despite recent advances, it hasn't been routinely applied to constitutional human diseases. Long-read sequencing detects intronic variants and phases variants, crucial for identifying recessive diseases.

We integrated long-read sequencing into the clinical diagnostic workflow for the MEFV gene, responsible for familial Mediterranean fever (FMF), using a Nanopore-based workflow. This involved long-range PCR amplification, native barcoding kit library preparation, GridION sequencing, and in-house bioinformatics. We compared this new workflow against our validated method using 39 patient samples and 3 samples from an external quality assessment scheme to ensure compliance with ISO15189 standards.

Our evaluation demonstrated excellent performance, meeting ISO15189 requirements for reproducibility, repeatability, sensitivity, and specificity. Since October 2022, 150 patient samples were successfully analyzed with no failures. Among these samples, we identified 13 heterozygous carriers of likely pathogenic (LP) or pathogenic (P) variants, 1 patient with a homozygous LP/P variant in MEFV, and 4 patients with compound heterozygous variants.

This study represents the first integration of long-read sequencing for FMF clinical diagnosis, achieving 100 % sensitivity and specificity. Our findings highlight its potential to identify pathogenic variants without parental segregation analysis, offering faster, cost-effective, and accurate clinical diagnosis. This successful implementation lays the groundwork for future applications in other constitutional human diseases, advancing precision medicine.