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Since the first reported case of the new coronavirus infection in Wuhan, China, researchers and governments have witnessed an unseen rise in the number of cases. Thanks to the rapid work of Chinese scientists, the pathogen now called SARS-CoV-2 has been identified and its whole genome was deposited in public databases by early January 2020. The availability of the genome has allowed researchers to develop Reverse Transcription—Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) assays, which are now the gold-standard for molecular diagnosis of the respiratory syndrome COVID19. Because of the rising number of cases and rapid spreading, the world has been facing a shortage of RT-PCR supplies, especially the ones involved in RNA extraction. This has been a major bottleneck to increase testing capacity in many countries that do not significantly manufacture these supplies, such as Brazil. Additionally, RT-qPCR scalability is highly dependent on equipment that usually performs testing of 96 samples at a time. In this work, we describe a cost-effective molecular NGS-based test for diagnosis of COVID19, which uses a single-step RNA extraction and presents high scalability and accuracy when compared to the gold-standard RT-qPCR. A single run of the NGS-based test using the Illumina NextSeq 550 mid-end sequencing equipment is able to multiplex 1,536 patient’s samples, providing individual semi-qualitative results (detected, not detected). Detected results are provided with fragments per million (FPM) values, which was demonstrated to correlate with RT-qPCR Cycle Threshold (CT) values. Besides, usage of the high-end Illumina Novaseq platform may yield diagnostic for up to 6144 samples in a single run. Performance results when compared with RT-qPCR show general accuracy of 96%, and 98% when only samples with CT values (gene N) lower than 30 are considered. We have also developed an online platform, termed VarsVID, to help test executors to easily scale testing numbers. Sample registering, wet-lab worksheets generation, sample sheet for sequencing and results’ display are all features provided by VarsVID. Altogether, these results will contribute to control COVID19 pandemics.

Rare diseases affect up to 13.2 million individuals in Brazil. The Brazilian Rare Genomes Project is envisioned to further the implementation of genomic medicine into the Brazilian public healthcare system. Here we report the validation results of a whole genome sequencing (WGS) procedure for implementation in clinical laboratories. In addition, we report data quality for the first 1,200 real-world patients sequenced. We sequenced a well-characterized group of 76 samples, including seven gold standard genomes, using a PCR-free WGS protocol on Illumina Novaseq 6,000 equipment. We compared the observed variant calls with their expected calls, observing good concordance for single nucleotide variants (SNVs; mean F-measure = 99.82%) and indels (mean F-measure = 99.57%). Copy number variants and structural variants events detection performances were as expected (F-measures 96.6% and 90.3%, respectively). Our WGS protocol presented excellent intra-assay reproducibility (coefficients of variation ranging between 0.03% and 0.20%) and inter-assay reproducibility (coefficients of variation ranging between 0.02% and 0.09%). Limitations of the WGS protocol include the inability to confidently detect variants such as uniparental disomy, balanced translocations, repeat expansion variants, and low-level mosaicism. In summary, the observed performance of the WGS protocol was in accordance with that seen in the best centers worldwide. The Rare Genomes Project is an important initiative to bring pivotal improvements to the quality of life of the affected individuals.

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We report here the genome sequences of the novel isolates G62T and G98T from rhodoliths. The nearly complete genomes consisted of 4.7 Mbp (4,233 coding sequences [CDS]) for G62T and 4.5 Mbp (4,085 CDS) for G98T.