1 Reflecting on a Decade of Transposon-Insertion Sequencing 2 3 Amy K. Cain1*, Lars Barquist2,3, Andrew L. Goodman4, Ian T. Paulsen1, Julian Parkhill5 and 4 Tim van Opijnen6* 5 6 Authors Affiliations: 7 1ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, Department of Molecular Sciences, 8 Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia 9 2 Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research, Helmholtz Centre for Infection 10 Research, Würzburg, BY, Germany 11 3 Faculty of Medicine, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, BY, Germany 12 4 Department of Microbial Pathogenesis and Microbial Sciences Institute, Yale University 13 School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA 14 5Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambs, UK 15 6 Department of Biology, Boston College, Boston, MA, USA 16 17 *corresponding authors:
[email protected] or
[email protected] 18 1 19 Abstract 20 It has been 10 years since the birth of modern transposon-insertion sequencing (TIS) 21 methods, which combine genome-wide transposon mutagenesis with high-throughput 22 sequencing to estimate the fitness contribution or essentiality of each genetic component 23 simultaneously in a bacterial genome. Four TIS variations were published in 2009: 24 transposon sequencing (Tn-Seq), transposon-directed insertion site sequencing (TraDIS), 25 insertion sequencing (INSeq) and high-throughput insertion tracking by deep sequencing 26 (HITS). TIS has since become an important tool for molecular microbiologists, being one of 27 the few genome-wide techniques that directly links phenotype to genotype and ultimately can 28 assign gene function. In this review, we discuss the recent applications of TIS to answer 29 overarching biological questions.