Accurate circular consensus long-read sequencing improves variant detection and assembly of a human genome

The DNA sequencing technologies in use today produce either highly accurate short reads or less-accurate long reads. We report the optimization of circular consensus sequencing (CCS) to improve the accuracy of single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing (PacBio) and generate highly accurate (99.8%) long high-fidelity (HiFi) reads with an average length of 13.5 kilobases (kb). We applied our approach to sequence the well-characterized human HG002/NA24385 genome and obtained precision and recall rates of at least 99.91% for single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), 95.98% for insertions and deletions 15 megabases (Mb) and concordance of 99.997%, substantially outperforming assembly with less-accurate long reads. High-fidelity reads improve variant detection and genome assembly on the PacBio platform.