The "Ifs" of NGS QC and Trimming

1. Ensures Data Integrity
   If you want to minimize errors in downstream analyses, QC and trimming remove low-quality reads and bases, ensuring high-confidence data. This step is essential for reliable variant calling, assembly, and other applications.

2. Removes Contaminants
   If adapter sequences or contaminants are present in the raw reads, trimming can eliminate them. This prevents issues like misalignment or incorrect biological interpretations, ensuring cleaner data for analysis.

3. Improves Mapping and Assembly
   If your goal is better alignment to a reference genome or improved de novo assembly, trimming low-quality bases and adapters is critical. High-quality reads map more efficiently and generate more accurate assemblies.

4. Reduces Computational Load
   If you want to save computational resources, trimming reduces the dataset size, which speeds up processing and analysis. Clean datasets mean less computational time spent on processing low-quality data.

5. Prepares for Standardized Analyses
   If your project involves multiple datasets, QC and trimming ensure uniformity across them. This standardization makes comparisons valid and reproducible, particularly in large collaborative studies.

The "Buts" of NGS QC and Trimming

1. Risk of Over-Trimming
   But excessive trimming can lead to the loss of informative sequences, reducing read depth and potentially discarding biologically relevant data. This is especially critical in studies with limited sequencing depth.

2. Bias Introduction
   But trimming algorithms might introduce biases, especially if they inadvertently remove sequences with specific biological patterns. This can skew results and compromise biological insights.

3. Loss of Context in Paired-End Reads
   But trimming one read in a pair more than the other can lead to loss of pairing information. This complicates downstream analyses that rely on paired-end data, such as structural variant detection.

4. Time and Resource Intensive
   But running QC and trimming for large datasets can be computationally expensive and time-consuming. As sequencing depth increases, preprocessing becomes a bottleneck in the analysis pipeline.

5. Variable Standards
   But the criteria for trimming (e.g., quality threshold, minimum read length) can vary between tools and datasets. This variability may affect reproducibility and comparability of results across studies.

Balancing the "Ifs" and "Buts"

To maximize the benefits of QC and trimming while mitigating the challenges, consider the following best practices:

• Use QC Tools Wisely: Start with tools like FastQC to identify quality issues in your raw data. Visualizing quality metrics helps tailor your trimming parameters.

• Choose Reliable Trimming Tools: Tools like Trimmomatic, Cutadapt, and BBduk offer adaptive and customizable trimming options. Select one that aligns with your dataset and project goals.

• Set Reasonable Parameters: Avoid over-trimming by setting quality thresholds and minimum read lengths that balance data retention and quality improvement.

• Test Downstream Effects: Validate the impact of QC and trimming on downstream analyses, such as alignment efficiency, variant calling accuracy, or assembly quality.

• Document Your Workflow: Maintain detailed records of the parameters and tools used for QC and trimming. This ensures reproducibility and enables better troubleshooting.

Conclusion

NGS quality control and trimming are essential steps to ensure reliable and accurate data for analysis. While the "ifs" highlight the clear benefits of these steps, the "buts" remind us of the potential pitfalls. By adopting best practices and carefully balancing these considerations, you can optimize your preprocessing workflow and unlock the full potential of your sequencing data.

1. Learning locus-specific PCR stutter models using an EM algorithm
2. Mining candidate STR alleles from population-scale sequencing data
3. Employing a specialized hidden Markov model to align reads to candidate alleles while accounting for STR artifacts
4. Utilizing phased SNP haplotypes to genotype and phase STRs

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tfwillems/HipSTR

Following are the genome assembly tools based on string graph:

1.SGA (String Graph Assembler) https://github.com/jts/sga

Assembles large genomes from high coverage short read data. SGA is designed as a modular set of programs, which are used to form an assembly pipeline. SGA implements a set of assembly algorithms based on the FM-index. As the FM-index is a compressed data structure, the algorithms are very memory efficient. The SGA assembly has three distinct phases. The first phase corrects base calling errors in the reads. The second phase assembles contigs from the corrected reads. The third phase uses paired end and/or mate pair data to build scaffolds from the contigs. The output of this software is a PDF report that allows the properties of the genome and data quality to be visually explored. By providing more information to the user at the start of an assembly project, this software will help increase awareness of the factors that make a given assembly easy or difficult, assist in the selection of software and parameters and help to troubleshoot an assembly if it runs into problems.

2. SAGE: String-overlap Assembly of GEnomes https://github.com/lucian-ilie/SAGE2

SAGE, for de novo genome assembly. As opposed to most assemblers, which are de Bruijn graph based, SAGE uses the string-overlap graph. SAGE builds upon great existing work on string-overlap graph and maximum likelihood assembly, bringing an important number of new ideas, such as the efficient computation of the transitive reduction of the string overlap graph, the use of (generalized) edge multiplicity statistics for more accurate estimation of read copy counts, and the improved use of mate pairs and min-cost flow for supporting edge merging. The assemblies produced by SAGE for several short and medium-size genomes compared favourably with those of existing leading assemblers.

3. FSG: Fast String Graph

The new integrated assembler has been assessed on a standard benchmark, showing that fast string graph (FSG) is significantly faster than SGA while maintaining a moderate use of main memory, and showing practical advantages in running FSG on multiple threads. Moreover, we have studied the effect of coverage rates on the running times.

4.  BASE https://github.com/dhlbh/BASE

It enhances the classic seed-extension approach by indexing the reads efficiently to generate adaptive seeds that have high probability to appear uniquely in the genome. Such seeds form the basis for BASE to build extension trees and then to use reverse validation to remove the branches based on read coverage and paired-end information, resulting in high-quality consensus sequences of reads sharing the seeds. Such consensus sequences are then extended to contigs. BASE is a practically efficient tool for constructing contig, with significant improvement in quality for long NGS reads. It is relatively easy to extend BASE to include scaffolding.

5. Fermi https://github.com/lh3/fermi/

Fermi is a de novo assembler with a particular focus on assembling Illumina short sequence reads from a mammal-sized genome. In addition to the role of a typical assembler, fermi also aims to preserve heterozygotes which are often collapsed by other assemblers. Its ultimate goal is to find a minimal set of unitigs to represent all the information in raw reads.

If you want to learn about String Graph assembler, please read the following papers -

i) The Fragment Assembly String Graph - E. W. Myers

This paper describes the String Graph concept.

ii) Efficient construction of an assembly string graph using the FM-index - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

This earlier paper from Simpson and Durbin

iii) Efficient de novo assembly of large genomes using compressed data structures - Jared T. Simpson and Richard Durbin

y a number of metrics, including:

• Overall assembly length
• Number of scaffolds/contigs
• Length of longest scaffold/contig
• Scaffold/contig N50 and N90Assembly base composition, in particular percentage GC and percentage Ns
• CEGMA completeness
• Scaffold/contig length/count distribution

assembly-stats supports two widely used presentations of these values, tabular and cumulative length plots, and introduces an additional circular plot that summarises most commonly used assembly metrics in a single visualisation. Each of these presentations is generated using javascript from a common (JSON) data structure, allowing toggling between alternative views, and each can be applied to a single or multiple assemblies to allow direct comparison of alternate assemblies.

Tabular presentation allows direct comparison of exact values between assemblies, the limitations of this approach lie in the necessary omission of distributions and the challenge of interpreting ratios of values that may vary by several orders of magnitude.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rjchallis/assembly-stats

This script has been modified by others to convert InDels as well, e.g. this by David Eccles

./vcf2fq.pl -f <input.fasta> <all-site.vcf> > <output.fastq>

https://github.com/gringer/bioinfscripts/blob/master/vcf2fq.pl

https://github.com/lh3/samtools/blob/master/bcftools/vcfutils.pl

Source code for SKESA is freely available at https://github.com/ncbi/SKESA/releases.

Research Paper @ Link

SKESA algorithm are as follows:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/ncbi/SKESA/releases

QUAST-LG is included in the QUAST  package starting from version 5.0.0 (download the latest release). Run QUAST as usual and do not forget to add ‐‐large option to your command!

A short list of the new features (see CHANGES for all):

• Significant speedup achieved by both use of new fast aligner (minimap2) and the refactoring of alignment analyzing modules
• New k-mer-based completeness and correctness metrics
• BUSCO added for enhanced reference-free analysis
• The concept of upper bound assembly (theoretical limits on the assembly completeness and contiguity for a given genome and set of reads)

Address of the bookmark: http://cab.spbu.ru/software/quast-lg/

I have used the following assemblers

• Spades (v. 3.10.1)
• CANU (v. 1.6)
• Unicycler (v. v0.4.1)
• Miniasm (v. 0.2-r137-dirty)

I have used the following mappers

• minimap2 (v. 2.0rc1-r232)
• minimap (v. 0.2-r124-dirty)
• bwa (v. 0.7.12-r1039)

I have used the following polishing tools

• Racon (v. not available)
• Pilon (v. 1.18)
• Nanopolish (v. 0.8.3)

I have used the following tools to assess genome assembly characteristics

• ANI.pl (https://github.com/chjp/ANI)
• CheckM (v. 1.0.7)
• Prokka (v. 1.12)
• QUAST (v. 2.3)
• mummer (v. not available)

If you have any ideas or superior tools we have missed please let us know in the comments.