This article is part of the supplement: Proceedings of the Second Annual RECOMB Satellite Workshop on Massively Parallel Sequencing (RECOMB-seq 2012)
Proceedings
Exploiting sparseness in de novo genome assembly
1 Ecology & Evolution of Plant-Animal Interaction Group, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanic Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Yunnan 666303 China
2 Ecology, Conservation, and Environment Center; State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan 650223 China
3 Department of Computer Science and Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
4 Computational Biology and Medical Ecology Lab; State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan 650223 China
5 Ecological Evolution Group, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanic Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Yunnan 666303 China
6 Department of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79410 USA
7 School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk NR47TJ UK
BMC Bioinformatics 2012, 13(Suppl 6):S1 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-13-S6-S1
Published: 19 April 2012Abstract
Background
The very large memory requirements for the construction of assembly graphs for de novo genome assembly limit current algorithms to super-computing environments.
Methods
In this paper, we demonstrate that constructing a sparse assembly graph which stores only a small fraction of the observed k-mers as nodes and the links between these nodes allows the de novo assembly of even moderately-sized genomes (~500 M) on a typical laptop computer.
Results
We implement this sparse graph concept in a proof-of-principle software package, SparseAssembler, utilizing a new sparse k-mer graph structure evolved from the de Bruijn graph. We test our SparseAssembler with both simulated and real data, achieving ~90% memory savings and retaining high assembly accuracy, without sacrificing speed in comparison to existing de novo assemblers.
