OPERA (Optimal Paired-End Read Assembler) is a sequence assembly program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_assembly). It uses information from paired-end/mate-pair/long reads to order and orient the intermediate contigs/scaffolds assembled in a genome assembly project, in a process known as Scaffolding. OPERA is based on an exact algorithm that is guaranteed to minimize the discordance of scaffolds with the information provided by the paired-end/mate-pair/long reads (for further details see Gao et al, 2011).
Note that since the original publication, we have made significant changes to OPERA (v1.0 onwards) including refinements to its basic algorithm (to reduce local errors, improve efficiency etc.) and incorporated features that are important for scaffolding large genomes (multi-library support, better repeat-handling etc.), in addition to other scalability and usability improvements (bam and gzip support, smaller memory footprint). We therefore encourage you to download and use our latest version: OPERA-LG. In our benchmarks, it has significantly improved corrected N50 and reduced the number of scaffolding errors. Furthermore, our latest release contains the wrapper script OPERA-long-read that enables scaffolding with long-reads from third-generation sequencing technologies (PacBio or Oxford Nanopore). The manuscript describing the new features and algorithms is available at Genome Biology. We look forward to getting your feedback to improve it further.
