Evaluation and Validation of Assembling Corrected PacBio Long Reads for Microbial Genome Completion via Hybrid Approaches.

Lin HH ，Liao YC 《PLoS One》

HISEA: HIerarchical SEed Aligner for PacBio data.

The next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques have been around for over a decade. Many of their fundamental applications rely on the ability to compute good genome assemblies. As the technology evolves, the assembly algorithms and tools have to continuously adjust and improve. The currently dominant technology of Illumina produces reads that are too short to bridge many repeats, setting limits on what can be successfully assembled. The emerging SMRT (Single Molecule, Real-Time) sequencing technique from Pacific Biosciences produces uniform coverage and long reads of length up to sixty thousand base pairs, enabling significantly better genome assemblies. However, SMRT reads are much more expensive and have a much higher error rate than Illumina's - around 10-15% - mostly due to indels. New algorithms are very much needed to take advantage of the long reads while mitigating the effect of high error rate and lowering the required coverage. An essential step in assembling SMRT data is the detection of alignments, or overlaps, between reads. High error rate and very long reads make this a much more challenging problem than for Illumina data. We present a new pairwise read aligner, or overlapper, HISEA (Hierarchical SEed Aligner) for SMRT sequencing data. HISEA uses a novel two-step k-mer search, employing consistent clustering, k-mer filtering, and read alignment extension. We compare HISEA against several state-of-the-art programs - BLASR, DALIGNER, GraphMap, MHAP, and Minimap - on real datasets from five organisms. We compare their sensitivity, precision, specificity, F1-score, as well as time and memory usage. We also introduce a new, more precise, evaluation method. Finally, we compare the two leading programs, MHAP and HISEA, for their genome assembly performance in the Canu pipeline. Our algorithm has the best alignment detection sensitivity among all programs for SMRT data, significantly higher than the current best. The currently best assembler for SMRT data is the Canu program which uses the MHAP aligner in its pipeline. We have incorporated our new HISEA aligner in the Canu pipeline and benchmarked it against the best pipeline for multiple datasets at two relevant coverage levels: 30x and 50x. Our assemblies are better than those using MHAP for both coverage levels. Moreover, Canu+HISEA assemblies for 30x coverage are comparable with Canu+MHAP assemblies for 50x coverage, while being faster and cheaper. The HISEA algorithm produces alignments with highest sensitivity compared with the current state-of-the-art algorithms. Integrated in the Canu pipeline, currently the best for assembling PacBio data, it produces better assemblies than Canu+MHAP.

Khiste N ，Ilie L 《BMC BIOINFORMATICS》

Completing bacterial genome assemblies: strategy and performance comparisons.

Liao YC ，Lin SH ，Lin HH 《Scientific Reports》

LR_Gapcloser: a tiling path-based gap closer that uses long reads to complete genome assembly.

Completing a genome is an important goal of genome assembly. However, many assemblies, including reference assemblies, are unfinished and have a number of gaps. Long reads obtained from third-generation sequencing (TGS) platforms can help close these gaps and improve assembly contiguity. However, current gap-closure approaches using long reads require extensive runtime and high memory usage. Thus, a fast and memory-efficient approach using long reads is needed to obtain complete genomes. We developed LR_Gapcloser to rapidly and efficiently close the gaps in genome assembly. This tool utilizes long reads generated from TGS sequencing platforms. Tested on de novo assembled gaps, repeat-derived gaps, and real gaps, LR_Gapcloser closed a higher number of gaps faster and with a lower error rate and a much lower memory usage than two existing, state-of-the art tools. This tool utilized raw reads to fill more gaps than when using error-corrected reads. It is applicable to gaps in the assemblies by different approaches and from large and complex genomes. After performing gap-closure using this tool, the contig N50 size of the human CHM1 genome was improved from 143 kb to 19 Mb, a 132-fold increase. We also closed the gaps in the Triticum urartu genome, a large genome rich in repeats; the contig N50 size was increased by 40%. Further, we evaluated the contiguity and correctness of six hybrid assembly strategies by combining the optimal TGS-based and next-generation sequencing-based assemblers with LR_Gapcloser. A proposed and optimal hybrid strategy generated a new human CHM1 genome assembly with marked contiguity. The contig N50 value was greater than 28 Mb, which is larger than previous non-reference assemblies of the diploid human genome. LR_Gapcloser is a fast and efficient tool that can be used to close gaps and improve the contiguity of genome assemblies. A proposed hybrid assembly including this tool promises reference-grade assemblies. The software is available at http://www.fishbrowser.org/software/LR_Gapcloser/.

Xu GC ，Xu TJ ，Zhu R ，Zhang Y ，Li SQ ，Wang HW ，Li JT ... -  《GigaScience》

SSPACE-LongRead: scaffolding bacterial draft genomes using long read sequence information.

Boetzer M ，Pirovano W 《BMC BIOINFORMATICS》