Additional clinical trials investigating the tolerability of plasma treatments and further developments in the technology of atmospheric cold plasma generated using small needles will hopefully pave the way for endoscopic applications in the event of liver and gut lesions. Second generation sequencing technologies have revolutionised genome research through the provision of a rapid, costeffective method for generating sequence data. However, obtaining complete bacterial genomes using these technologies has been challenging. Short read lengths are a characteristic feature of SGS technologies and highly repetitive stretches of DNA, often present in multiple copies, are difficult to correctly resolve using these platforms. Typically, these assemblies are highly fragmented, prone to misassembly and require costly and time consuming finishing procedures. Consequently, most genomes are not completely resolved; they are submitted as draft genomes, often containing hundreds of contigs that are generally unannotated or poorly annotated. As a result, many of these genomes are of limited use for comparative, functional, clinical and epidemiological studies. In contrast to other methods, the SAR131675 Pacific Biosciences single molecule real time sequencing platform can produce read lengths of up to 30,000 bp that are capable of spanning large repeat regions, thereby facilitating the generation of complete genome assemblies without the need for additional sequencing. Here we report the complete genome sequence of the E. coli ST131 strain EC958. Sequencing the genome of E. coli EC958 with six SMRT cells of data followed by de novo assembly using the HGAP method and minimal post-processing produced a high quality finished genome comparable in terms of contiguity and error rate with a 454 GS-FLX mate-pair derived assembly. Since the sequence data for this genome was generated, the PacBio SMRT platform has transitioned from the RS I to the RS II instrument and improved chemistry, with average read lengths increasing to,8 kb. Consequently, we expect that sequencing strategies utilising fewer than six SMRT cells on the PacBio RS II platform should be capable of producing fully assembled bacterial genomes with minimal intervention. The sensitivity of PacBio for detecting dynamic prophage rearrangements is due to the length of PacBio reads, which allows them to span inverted regions and thus force the assembler to generate two alternative versions of regions that have undergone inversion in a subset of the bacterial population.