Obtaining Detailed Phage Transcriptomes Using ONT-Cappable-Seq.

Detailed transcription maps of bacteriophages are not usually explored, limiting our understanding of molecular phage biology and restricting their exploitation and engineering. The ONT-cappable-seq method described here brings phage transcriptomics to the accessible nanopore sequencing platform and provides an affordable and more detailed overview of transcriptional features compared to traditional RNA-seq experiments. With ONT-cappable-seq, primary transcripts are specifically capped, enriched, and prepared for long-read sequencing on the nanopore sequencing platform. This enables end-to-end sequencing of unprocessed transcripts covering both phage and host genome, thus providing insight on their operons. The subsequent analysis pipeline makes it possible to rapidly identify the most important transcriptional features such as transcription start and stop sites. The obtained data can thus provide a comprehensive overview of the transcription by your phage of interest.