Some parts of a genome may have a very high degree of heterozygosity. This causes contigs for both haplotypes of that part of the genome to be assembled as separate primary contigs, rather than as a contig and an associated haplotig. This can be an issue for downstream analysis whether you're working on the haploid or phased-diploid assembly.
Identify pairs of contigs that are syntenic and move one of them to the haplotig 'pool'. The pipeline uses mapped read coverage and Minimap2 alignments to determine which contigs to keep for the haploid assembly. Dotplots are optionally produced for all flagged contig matches, juxtaposed with read-coverage, to help the user determine the proper assignment of any remaining ambiguous contigs. The pipeline will run on either a haploid assembly (i.e. Canu, FALCON or FALCON-Unzip primary contigs) or on a phased-diploid assembly (i.e. FALCON-Unzip primary contigs + haplotigs). Here are two examples of how Purge Haplotigs can improve a haploid and diploid assembly.
