Microgenomics 2021 webinar: How reproducible are results from microbial sequencing assays?
Channel: The International Symposium on Microgenomics 2023
Date: 2022-01-25

Ronan Doyle (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK): "How reproducible are results from microbial sequencing assays?"

As the implementation costs and technical barriers fall, metagenomics and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of pathogens from patient samples is being adopted by clinical microbiology laboratories. However, there are a myriad of bioinformatic tools and pipelines used to analyse and present the data generated. We performed two inter-laboratory studies where participants were given identical sequence data and asked to predict microbial composition and antimicrobial resistance profiles using their own bioinformatics pipelines and tools. Using this data we identify key contributors to the discrepancies in results between laboratories and make recommendations on how this can improved going forward.