BELLA: Berkeley Efficient Long-Read to Long-Read Aligner and Overlapper

Abstract

Recent advances in long-read sequencing enable the characterization of genome structure and its intra- and inter-species variation at a resolution that was previously impossible. Detecting overlaps between reads is integral to many long-read genomics pipelines, such as de novo genome assembly. While longer reads simplify genome assembly and improve the contiguity of the reconstruction, current long-read technologies come with high error rates. We present Berkeley Long-Read to Long-Read Aligner and Overlapper (BELLA), a novel algorithm for computing overlaps and alignments via sparse matrix-matrix multiplication that balances the goals of recall and precision, performing well on both. We present a probabilistic model that demonstrates the feasibility of using short k-mers for detecting candidate overlaps. We then introduce a notion of reliable k-mers based on our probabilistic model. Combining reliable k-mers with our binning mechanism eliminates both the k-mer set explosion that would otherwise occur with highly erroneous reads and the spurious overlaps from k-mers originating in repetitive regions. Finally, we present a new method based on Chernoff bounds for separating true overlaps from false positives using a combination of alignment techniques and probabilistic modeling. Our methodologies aim at maximizing the balance between precision and recall. On both real and synthetic data, BELLA performs amongst the best in terms of F1 score, showing performance stability which is often missing for competitor software. BELLAs F1 score is consistently within 1.7% of the top entry. Notably, we show improved de novo assembly results on synthetic data when coupling BELLA with the Miniasm assembler.