However, due to technical limitations, much of the HCMV genome remained transcriptionally unannotated 7. A recent Illumina-based short-read sequencing study has shown that the HCMV transcriptome is more complex than it had been recognized previously 8. Northern blot and, more recently, Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends (RACE) analyses have been utilized to characterize HCMV transcripts 7. The Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a human pathogenic betaherpesvirus with a genome size of approximately 235,000 base pairs (bp). More transcriptomic data generated by long-read sequencing would also facilitate the development of analysis tools needed to evaluate such data. However, only few long-read RNA-Seq datasets are currently available, therefore our understanding of the characteristics and limitations of this technology is still lacking.

However, even in its present state, long-read RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is well suited for the characterization of smaller transcriptomes of organisms with known reference genomes, such as viruses 4– 6. The currently available long-read sequencing platforms have a relatively high error-rate and a low throughput. Long-read sequencing surveys of eukaryotic transcriptomes have demonstrated the potential of this new technology in identifying novel transcripts and characterizing transcript isoforms 1– 3. The described data include raw and processed sequencing files, and combined with other datasets, they can be used to validate transcriptome analysis tools, to compare library preparation methods, to test base calling algorithms or to identify genetic variants. Our dataset contains 122,636 human and 33,086 viral (HMCV strain Towne) reads. Seven SMRT cells were sequenced using oligo(dT) primers to reverse transcribe poly(A)-selected RNA molecules and one library was prepared using random primers for the reverse transcription of the rRNA-depleted sample. We hereby present a long-read RNA sequencing dataset of HCMV infected human lung fibroblast cells sequenced by the Pacific Biosciences RSII platform. The human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) genome has been first sequenced in 1989 and although short-read sequencing studies have uncovered much of the complexity of its transcriptome, only few of its transcripts have been fully annotated.

Long-read RNA sequencing allows for the precise characterization of full-length transcripts, which makes it an indispensable tool in transcriptomics.

Sdata tool no virus