Amplified DNA heterogeneity assessment with Oxford Nanopore sequencing applied to cell free expression templates

In this work, Oxford Nanopore sequencing is tested as an accessible method for quantifying heterogeneity of amplified DNA. This method enables rapid quantification of deletions, insertions, and substitutions, the probability of each mutation error, and their locations in the replicated sequences. Amplification techniques tested were conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with varying levels of polymerase fidelity (OneTaq, Phusion, and Q5) as well as rolling circle amplification (RCA) with Phi29 polymerase. Plasmid amplification using bacteria was also assessed. By analyzing the distribution of errors in a large set of sequences for each sample, we examined the heterogeneity and mode of errors in each sample. This analysis revealed that Q5 and Phusion polymerases exhibited the lowest error rates observed in the amplified DNA. As a secondary validation, we analyzed the emission spectra of sfGFP fluorescent proteins synthesized with amplified DNA using cell free expression. Error-prone polymerase chain reactions confirmed the dependency of reporter protein emission spectra peak broadness to DNA error rates. The presented nanopore sequencing methods serve as a roadmap to quantify the accuracy of other gene amplification techniques, as they are discovered, enabling more homogenous cell-free expression of desired proteins.