BOL

Miniasm is a great long-read assembly tool: straight-forward, effective and very fast. However, it does not include a polishing step, so its assemblies have a high error rate – they are essentially made of stitched-together pieces of long reads.

Racon is a great polishing tool that can be used to clean up assembly errors. It's also very fast and well suited for long-read data. However, it operates on FASTA files, not the GFA graphs that miniasm makes.

That's where Minipolish comes in. With a single command, it will use Racon to polish up a miniasm assembly, while keeping the assembly in graph form.

It also takes care of some of the other nuances of polishing a miniasm assembly:

• Adding read depth information to contigs
• Fixing sequence truncation that can occur in Racon
• Adding circularising links to circular contigs if not already present (so they display better in Bandage)
• 'Rotating' circular contigs between polishing rounds to ensure clean circularisation