title: Pathogenic and genetic characteristics of multidrug resistant Escherichia coli associated with milk products sold in the informal dairy sector in Zimbabwe
design: Library preparation was performed using the Nextera XT DNA library preparation kit (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA). Sequencing was then conductedperfomed at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, South Africa on anusing a Illumina MiSeq benchtop sequencer (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA), generating paired- end reads of 2  150 bp read length. The quality of the sequenced libraries was assessed using FastQC v0.11.7 (Andrews, 2010). The reads were filtered and adapter- trimmed with Fastp v0.23.(Chen et al., 2018) using a minimum Phred score of 30.