Comparison of Nextera XT and Collibri ES library preparation kits: from wet lab to bioinformatics analysis

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) analyses are key for a great number of studies nowadays. In order to carry out WGS, DNA is fragmented and adapter sequences are added to each end. This input format is most commonly known as ‘libraries’ and there are multiple methods to prepare them. Herein, we compared two DNA library preparation kits (Nextera XT and Collibri™) with distinct enzymatic fragmentation strategies to sequence four Clostridium perfringens isolates. Based on a thorough statistical and bioinformatics analysis, we concluded that Collibri™ performs better than Nextera XT as the former produced more complete assemblies, showed more coverage and depth when mapped to the reference genome and was unbiased towards regions with particular GC% in comparison to the latter.