Differential assessment of human disease-associated ribosomal RNA modifications using Nanopore direct RNA sequencing

Ribosomal RNAs are decorated by numerous post-transcriptional modifications whose exact roles in ribosome biogenesis, function, and human pathophysiology remain largely unknown. Here, we report a targeted direct rRNA sequencing approach involving a substrate selection step and demonstrate its suitability to identify differential modification sites in combination with the JACUSA2 software. We compared JACUSA2 to other tools designed for RNA modification detection and show that JACUSA2 outperforms other software with regards to detection of base modifications such as methylation, acetylation and aminocarboxypropylation. To illustrate its widespread usability, we applied our method to a collection of CRISPR-Cas9 engineered colon carcinoma cells lacking specific enzymatic activities responsible for particular rRNA modifications and systematically compared them to isogenic wild type RNAs. Beside the numerous 2′-O methylated riboses and pseudouridylated residues, our approach was suitable to reliably identify differential base methylation and acetylation events. Importantly, our method does not require any prior knowledge of modification sites, or the need to train complex models. We further report for the first time detection of human rRNA modifications by direct RNA-sequencing on Flongle flow cells, the smallest-scale Nanopore flow cell available to date. The use of these smaller flow cells reduces RNA input requirements, making our workflow suitable for the analysis of samples with limited availability and clinical work