With rapidly falling costs, long-read DNA sequencing technology from Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), are beginning to be used for outbreak investigations [@Faria2017; @Quick2015] and rapid infectious disease clinical diagnostics [@Votintseva2017]. ONT instruments can produce data within minutes, and PacBio within hours compared to short-read sequencing technologies which takes hours/days. By reducing the time from swab to an actionable answer, genomics can begin to directly influence clinical decisions, with the potential for a positive impact for patients [@Gardy2017]. Clinically important genes, like those conferring animicrobial resistance or encoding virulence factors, can be horizontally acquired from plasmids. With the increased speed afforded by long-read sequencing technologies comes increased base errors rates. The high error rates inherent in long-read sequencing reads require specialised tools to correct the reads [@Koren2017], however, these methods require substantial computational requirements, and often take longer to run than the original time to generate the sequencing data, and can result in the loss of small, clinically important plasmids.
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