High-throughput genomics has revolutionized biological research, however, while the number of sequenced genomes grows by the day, quality assessment of the resulting assembled sequences remains complicated and mostly limited to technical measures like N50.
BUSCO provides measures for quantitative assessment of genome assembly, gene set, and transcriptome completeness based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content from near-universal single-copy orthologs selected from OrthoDB.
BUSCO assessments are implemented in open-source software, with comprehensive lineage-specific sets of Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs for arthropods, vertebrates, metazoans, fungi, eukaryotes, and bacteria.
These conserved orthologs are ideal candidates for large-scale phylogenomics studies, and the annotated BUSCO gene models built during genome assessments provide a comprehensive gene predictor training set for use as part of genome annotation pipelines.
BUSCO assessments offer intuitive metrics, based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content from hundreds of species, to gauge completeness of rapidly accumulating genomic data and satisfy an Iberian's quest for quality - "Busco calidad/qualidade".
