The rhesus macaque ( Macaca mulatta ) is an abundant primate species that diverged from the ancestors of Homo sapiens about 25 million years ago. Because they are genetically and physiologically similar to humans, rhesus monkeys are the most widely used nonhuman primate in basic and applied biomedical research. We determined the genome sequence of an Indian-origin Macaca mulatta female and compared the data with chimpanzees and humans to reveal the structure of ancestral primate genomes and to identify evidence for positive selection and lineage-specific expansions and contractions of gene families. A comparison of sequences from individual animals was used to investigate their underlying genetic diversity. The complete description of the macaque genome blueprint enhances the utility of this animal model for biomedical research and improves our understanding of the basic biology of the species.

Structural variants (SVs) are common in the human genome. Because approximately half of the human genome consists of repetitive, transposable DNA sequences, it is plausible that these elements play an important role in generating SVs in humans. Sequencing of the diploid genome of one individual human (HuRef) affords us the opportunity to assess, for the first time, the impact of mobile elements on SVs in an individual in a thorough and unbiased fashion. In this study, we systematically evaluated more than 8000 SVs to identify mobile element-associated SVs as small as 100 bp and specific to the HuRef genome. Combining computational and experimental analyses, we identified and validated 706 mobile element insertion events (including Alu, L1, SVA elements, and nonclassical insertions), which added more than 305 kb of new DNA sequence to the HuRef genome compared with the Human Genome Project (HGP) reference sequence (hg18). We also identified 140 mobile element-associated deletions, which removed ∼126 kb of sequence from the HuRef genome. Overall, ∼10% of the HuRef-specific indels larger than 100 bp are caused by mobile element-associated events. More than one-third of the insertion/deletion events occurred in genic regions, and new Alu insertions occurred in exons of three human genes. Based on the number of insertions and the estimated time to the most recent common ancestor of HuRef and the HGP reference genome, we estimated the Alu, L1, and SVA retrotransposition rates to be one in 21 births, 212 births, and 916 births, respectively. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of mobile element-related structural variants in the complete DNA sequence of an individual and demonstrates that mobile elements play an important role in generating inter-individual structural variation.

Characterizing the microbial communities inhabiting specimens is one of the primary objectives of microbiome studies. A short-read sequencing platform for reading partial regions of the 16S rRNA gene is most commonly used by reducing the cost burden of next-generation sequencing (NGS), but misclassification at the species level due to its length being too short to consider sequence similarity remains a challenge. Loop Genomics recently proposed a new 16S full-length-based synthetic long-read sequencing technology (sFL16S). We compared a 16S full-length-based synthetic long-read (sFL16S) and V3-V4 short-read (V3V4) methods using 24 human GUT microbiota samples. Our comparison analyses of sFL16S and V3V4 sequencing data showed that they were highly similar at all classification resolutions except the species level. At the species level, we confirmed that sFL16S showed better resolutions than V3V4 in analyses of alpha-diversity, relative abundance frequency and identification accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrated that sFL16S could overcome the microbial misidentification caused by different sequence similarity in each 16S variable region through comparison the identification accuracy of Bifidobacterium, Bacteroides, and Alistipes strains classified from both methods. Therefore, this study suggests that the new sFL16S method is a suitable tool to overcome the weakness of the V3V4 method.

Mobile elements have created structural variation in the human genome through their de novo insertions and post-insertional genomic rearrangements. L1 elements are a type of long interspersed element (LINE) that is dispersed at high copy numbers within most mammalian genomes. To determine the magnitude of L1 recombination-associated deletions (L1RADs), we computationally extracted L1RAD candidates by comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes and verified each of the L1RAD events by using wet-bench analyses. Through these analyses, we identified 73 human-specific L1RAD events that occurred subsequent to the divergence of the human and chimpanzee lineages. Despite their low frequency, the L1RAD events deleted ≈450 kb of the human genome. One L1RAD event generated a large deletion of ≈64 kb. Multiple alignments of prerecombination and postrecombination L1 elements suggested that two different deletion mechanisms generated the L1RADs: nonallelic homologous recombination (55 events) and nonhomologous end joining between two L1s (18 events). In addition, the position of L1RADs throughout the genome does not correlate with local chromosomal recombination rates. This process may be implicated in the partial regulation of L1 copy numbers by the finding that ≈60% of the DNA sequences deleted by the L1RADs consist of L1 sequences that were either directly involved in the recombination events or located in the intervening sequence between recombining L1s. Overall, there is increasing evidence that L1RADs have played an important role in creating structural variation.