New preprint: Rapid decontamination of SARS-CoV-2 genetic reads

This preprint by Hunt et al. (2022) describes some software, ReadItAndKeep, that rapidly removes host (i.e. human) genetic information from a sample. This is necessary to ensure that a sample containing SARS-CoV-2 genetic reads cannot be linked to the individual who gave the sample whilst it is being processed by GPAS in the cloud. Martin Hunt and Zam Iqbal did the majority of the work and I provided a diverse set of publicly available SARS-CoV-2 genomes for testing.

References

Hunt, M, J Swann, B Constantinides, PW Fowler, and Z Iqbal. 2022. “ReadItAndKeep: Rapid Decontamination of SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing Reads.” Bioinformatics 38: 3291. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac311.