Hobrac: a reference-guided workflow for genome comparison and synteny visualization

Abstract

Whole-genome comparison is fundamental for validating genome assemblies and investigating genome evolution, yet identifying suitable reference genomes and interpreting chromosome-scale synteny from often noisy nucleotide alignments remain challenging. We introduce Hobrac, an automated workflow that addresses these two major bottlenecks by combining automated reference genome selection with gene-based structural comparisons. Starting from a genome assembly and its taxon identifier, Hobrac identifies suitable reference genomes, complements nucleotide alignments with conserved BUSCO orthologues, and generates publication-quality visualizations. The workflow produces dotplots, ribbon-plots and synteny visualization that can be explored interactively or offline. Hobrac is freely available at https://github.com/Genoscope-LBGB/hobrac.