Genome Assembly: Glossary

Understand the genome assembly workflow.

The SLURM scheduler faciliates the fair distribution of compute resource amongst users.

While long-read data are beneficial for producing high-quality genomes, short-read data can help understand the underlying properties of the genome of the focal species.

It is important to consider characteristics such as genome size, ploidy, and heterozygosity before assembling a genome, as this may influence program choice, parameter-setting, and overall assembly quality.

There are a wide variety of genome assembly programs available, each with specific strengths, weaknesses, and requirements. Building familiarity with a range of assemblers by reading program manuals and associated articles can be helpful.

All genome assemblies are imperfect, but some are more imperfect than others. The quality of an assembly must be assessed using multiple lines of evidence.

Multiple rounds of polishing using different data sets can improve the accuracy of a genome assembly, and is particularly important when assemblies are produced using Nanopore data.

We have done a lot of work to get our genome assembly to this stage, but there are a number of downstream processes that can be done that can further improve the assembly and make it more useful for biological research.