Editorial: Novel applications of ONT technologies in genomics and transcriptomics

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DNA sequencing, genomic assays, ONT Editorial on the Research Topic Novel applications of ONT technologies in genomics and transcriptomicsPacBio and Oxford Nanopore sequencing technologies have been developed rapidly in the last decade.The Oxford Nanopore sequencing is based on a direct measurement of the electric current that flows through the nanopore embedded in an electro-resistant membrane.It eliminates a need for PCR-based amplification of DNA/RNA and allows the identification of epigenetic modifications.This rapid pace of ONT technological revolution can be seen worldwide especially for low-cost rapid nucleotide sequencing.ONT markets have developed rapidly in the past decade.Four generations of nanomaterials have been developed.The quality (raw sequencing error rate and the length of reads) of ONT has being improved literally each month and now is in excess of 99% for direct sequencing chemistry.The Research Topic attracts many downloads and receives many citations, but as the technology is rapidly evolving, regular updates on this technology are required.Why ONT has become so popular?The major ONT advantage is a possibility to effectively sequence very long reads that could be up to hundreds of thousands of nucleotides while simultaneously detecting native epigenetic modifications.Analysis of ONT data is not standard yet due to complexity of bioinformatics pipelines that allow for analyses of long reads that contain a higher rate of sequencing errors compared to the short-read technologies.However, many applications of ONT data analysis are relatively straightforward and easy to apply.A comprehensive and interactive catalogue of analysis tools for long-read sequencing data is available at the "long-read-tools.org"website (https://long-read-tools.org/index.html).This is an open-source centralized database that allows exploration of long-read data analysis tools through interactive browsing and filtering.Currently, the database contains more than 500 tools across 32 categories of data analyses.The most frequent analysis tasks include base calling, de novo assembly, error correction, quality controls and filtering, while long-read single-cell data analysis and transcriptomics (including isoform detection) are areas with the fewest tools available at the "long-read-tools.org"website.This Research Topic begins with a comprehensive review "Resolving complex structural variants via nanopore sequencing" by Romagnoli et al. which discussed the successful applications of ONT approach for recent developments of NGS (next-generation sequencing) platforms for detection of structural variants (SVs) as the hallmark of genome instability, potentially leading to pathologic conditions.