Ultrasensitive single-genome sequencing: accurate, targeted, next generation sequencing of HIV-1 RNA

Background Although next generation sequencing (NGS) offers the potential for studying virus populations in unprecedented depth, PCR error, amplification bias and recombination during library construction have limited its use to population sequencing and measurements of unlinked allele frequencies. Here we report a method, termed ultrasensitive Single-Genome Sequencing (uSGS), for NGS library construction and analysis that eliminates PCR errors and recombinants, and generates single-genome sequences of the same quality as the “gold-standard” of HIV-1 single-genome sequencing assay but with more than 100-fold greater depth.