PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Le Tung Lam
AU  - Nguyen Trung Hieu
AU  - Nguyen Hong Trang
AU  - Ho Thi Thuong
AU  - Tran Huyen Linh
AU  - Luu Thuy Tien
AU  - Nguyen Thi Ngoc Thao
AU  - Huynh Thi Kim Loan
AU  - Pham Duy Quang
AU  - Luong Chan Quang
AU  - Cao Minh Thang
AU  - Nguyen Vu Thuong
AU  - Hoang Ha
AU  - Chu Hoang Ha
AU  - Phan Trong Lan
AU  - Truong Nam Hai
TI  - WHOLE-GENOME SEQUENCING AND <em>DE NOVO</em> ASSEMBLY OF A 2019 NOVEL CORONAVIRUS (SARS-COV-2) STRAIN ISOLATED IN VIETNAM
AID  - 10.1101/2020.06.12.149377
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.06.12.149377
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/13/2020.06.12.149377.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/13/2020.06.12.149377.full
AB  - The pandemic COVID-19 caused by the zoonotic virus SARS-CoV-2 has devastated countries worldwide, infecting more than 4.5 million people and leading to more than 300,000 deaths. Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is an effective tool to monitor emerging strains and provide information for intervention, thus help to inform outbreak control decisions. Here, we reported the first effort to sequence and de novo assemble the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 using PacBio’s SMRT sequencing technology in Vietnam. We also presented the annotation results and a brief analysis of the variants found in our SARS-CoV-2 strain, which was isolated from a Vietnamese patient. The sequencing was successfully completed and de novo assembled in less than 30 hours, resulting in one contig with no gap and a length of 29,766 bp. All detected variants as compared to the NCBI reference were highly accurate as confirmed by Sanger sequencing. The results have shown the potential of long read sequencing to provide high quality WGS data to support public health responses, and advance understanding of this and future pandemics.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.