• Bioconductor – A plethora of tools for analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data, including 1500+ software packages. [ paper-2004 | web ]
• Biopython – Freely available tools for biological computing in Python, with included cookbook, packaging and thorough documentation. Part of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. Contains the very useful Entrez package for API access to the NCBI databases. [ paper-2009 | web ]
• Bioconda – A channel for the conda package manager specializing in bioinformatics software. Includes a repository with 3000+ ready-to-install (with conda install) bioinformatics packages. [ paper-2018 | web ]
• BioJulia – Bioinformatics and computational biology infastructure for the Julia programming language. [ web ]
• Rust-Bio – Rust implementations of algorithms and data structures useful for bioinformatics. [ paper-2016 ]
• SeqAn – The modern C++ library for sequence analysis.

http://katjulab.com/research.html

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

https://alitvteam.github.io/AliTV/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/AliTVTeam/AliTV

If you are interested in gene prediction, have a look at GenomeThreader.

Address of the bookmark: http://genometools.org/

• Step 1. Run mugsy to get multiple sequence alignment results.
• Step 2 & 3. Extraction of the Coordinates of Core Blocks, Construction of Synteny Blocks and Generating Signed Permutations.
• Step 4. Generate pairwise genome rearrangement scenarios and find repeats at the breakpoints of each rearrangement events.

https://github.com/DanwangJessica/GRSR

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/DanwangJessica/GRSR

In this report, we compare and evaluate several genome assembly software based on TSG technology. The experimentation has been performed on 4 reference genomes and the results evaluated with the QUAST software. The 11 software that have been evaluated are: Celera Assembler , Falcon , Miniasm, Newbler , SGA Assembler, Smartdenovo, Abruijn, Ra, DBG2OLC, Spades and Cerulean. The first 8 software use only long reads, while the 3 last software can merge long and short reads

To create single-genome plot by aligning genome data along all chromosomes of a single genome, go to the Single-genome plot menu.

To cretae two-genome plot for comparison of data across two genomes, go to the Two-genome plot menu.

For the detail format of input data, check the Input data format submenu of the Help menu.

shinyChromosome is deployed at http://150.109.59.144:3838/shinyChromosome/, http://shinyChromosome.ncpgr.cn, and https://yimingyu.shinyapps.io/shinyChromosome for online use. The source code and manual of shinyChromosome are freely available at https://github.com/venyao/shinyChromosome.

https://yimingyu.shinyapps.io/shinychromosome/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672022919301883

Address of the bookmark: https://yimingyu.shinyapps.io/shinychromosome/

You can try this here, or try it later on your own data.

Get data

We will use the same Illumina data as we used above:

• illumina_R1.fastq.gz: the Illumina forward reads
• illumina_R2.fastq.gz: the Illumina reverse reads

Assemble

Run Spades:

spades.py -1 illumina_R1.fastq.gz -2 illumina_R2.fastq.gz --careful --cov-cutoff auto -o spades_assembly_all_illumina

• -1 is input file of forward reads
• -2 is input file of reverse reads
• --careful minimizes mismatches and short indels
• --cov-cutoff auto computes the coverage threshold (rather than the default setting, “off”)
• -o is the output directory

Results

Move into the output directory and look at the contigs:

infoseq contigs.fasta

Smudgeplots are computed from raw or even better from trimmed reads and show the haplotype structure using heterozygous kmer pairs. For example:

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/KamilSJaron/smudgeplot