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  • Evaluating Illumina-, Nanopore-, and PacBio-based genome assembly strategies with the bald notothen, Trematomus borchgrevinki
Title: Evaluating Illumina-, Nanopore-, and PacBio-based genome assembly strategies with the bald notothen, Trematomus borchgrevinki
Abstract For any genome-based research, a robust genome assembly is required. De novo assembly strategies have evolved with changes in DNA sequencing technologies and have been through at least three phases: i) short-read only, ii) short- and long-read hybrid, and iii) long-read only assemblies. Each of the phases has their own error model. We hypothesized that hidden scaffolding errors in short-read assembly and erroneous long-read contigs degrades the quality of short- and long-read hybrid assemblies. We assembled the genome of T. borchgrevinki from data generated during each of the three phases and assessed the quality problems we encountered. We developed strategies such as k-mer-assembled region replacement, parameter optimization, and long-read sampling to address the error models. We demonstrated that a k-mer based strategy improved short-read assemblies as measured by BUSCO while mate-pair libraries introduced hidden scaffolding errors and perturbed BUSCO scores. Further, we found that although hybrid assemblies can generate higher contiguity they tend to suffer from lower quality. In addition, we found long-read only assemblies can be optimized for contiguity by sub-sampling length-restricted raw reads. Our results indicate that long-read contig assembly is the current best choice and that assemblies from phase I and phase II were of lower quality.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1645087
PAR ID:
10358678
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics
ISSN:
2160-1836
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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