Benchmarking state-of-the-art approaches for norovirus genome assembly in metagenome sample

MotivationA recently published article in BMC Genomics by Fuentes-Trillo et al (2021) contains a comparison of assembly approaches of several Noroviral samples via different tools and preprocessing strategies. Unfortunately the study used outdated versions of tools as well as tools that were not designed for the viral assembly task. In order to improve the suboptimal assemblies the authors suggested different sophisticated preprocessing strategies that seem to make only minor contributions to the results. We redone the analysis using state-of-the art tools designed for viral assembly. ResultsHere we demonstrate that tools from the SPAdes toolkit (O_SCPLOWRNAVIRALC_SCPLOWSPAO_SCPLOWDESC_SCPLOW and O_SCPLOWCORONAC_SCPLOWSPAO_SCPLOWDESC_SCPLOW) allows one to assemble the samples from the original study into a single contig without any additional preprocessing.