Bact-Builder

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Invention Summary:

Mycobacterium tuberculosis infects a quarter of the world's population and was the second leading infectious disease killer after SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. The H37Rv strain of M. tuberculosis is widely used in laboratory experiments, but current genome assembly tools are unreliable and lack consistency.

Rutgers researchers have integrated an algorithm called Bact-Builder to address this gap. The novel pipeline uses consensus building to generate highly accurate gap-closed bacterial genomes from raw sequencing data. This novel pipeline has been tested to provide ~100% accuracy and reproducibility when sequencing three separate H37Rv cultures, as well as the ability of the assembly tool to reveal ~6.4 kb of new sequence that is absent from in the GenBank. .

Market Applications:

• Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) detection
• Phylogenetic studies
• Construction of new reference sequences
• Variant analysis
• Meta-genomic and pan-genomic studies.

Advantages:

• Generates highly accurate genomes using existing programs.
• Open-source and easy to use via singularity containers.
• Can assemble raw sequencing reads into a polished genome with 50x genome coverage.
• Final genomes are gap-closed and highly reproducible.
• Outputs can be used for various downstream applications such as new reference sequences, reference-based assembly, RNAseq, TnSeq, and meta-genomic and pan-genomic studies.

Intellectual Property & Development Status: Looking for research and business collaboration. For any business development and other collaborative partnerships contact:  marketingbd@research.rutgers.edu