bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.30.437686; this version posted March 30, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. Combined Nanopore and Single-Molecule Real-Time Sequencing Survey of Human Betaherpesvirus 5 Transcriptome Balázs Kakuk1#, Dóra Tombácz1,2,3#, Zsolt Balázs1, Norbert Moldován1, Zsolt Csabai1, Gábor Torma1, Klára Megyeri4, Michael Snyder3, Zsolt Boldogkői1* 1Department of Medical Biology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Szeged, Somogyi B. u. 4., 6720 Szeged, Hungary 2MTA-SZTE Momentum GeMiNI Research Group, University of Szeged, Somogyi B. u. 4., 6720 Szeged, Hungary 3Department of Genetics, School of Medicine, Stanford University, 300 Pasteur Dr, Stanford, California, USA 4Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunobiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Szeged, Szeged, 6720, Hungary # The first two authors contributed equally to this work *To whom correspondence should be addressed:
[email protected] ABSTRACT Long-read sequencing (LRS), a powerful novel approach, is able to read full-length transcripts and confers a major advantage over the earlier gold standard short-read sequencing in the efficiency of identifying for example polycistronic transcripts and transcript isoforms, including transcript length- and splice variants. In this work, we profile the human cytomegalovirus transcriptome using two third- generation LRS platforms: the Sequel from Pacific BioSciences, and MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies. We carried out both cDNA and direct RNA sequencing, and applied the LoRTIA software, developed in our laboratory, for the transcript annotations.