Rescuing low frequency variants within intra-host viral populations directly from Oxford Nanopore sequencing data

Abstract

Tracking low frequency intra-host variants has helped understanding within-host viral population dynamics and transmission. Precise tracking, however, depends partially on the error rate of the sequencing platforms used. Here, Liu et al. present Variabel, a method to rescue low frequency intra-host variants from Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) platforms and validate their approach on Ebola virus, norovirus, and SARS-CoV-2 datasets.