Economic Genome Assembly from Low Coverage Illumina and Nanopore Data

Abstract

We describe a new approach to assemble genomes from a combination of low-coverage short and long reads. LazyBastard starts from a bipartite overlap graph between long reads and restrictively filtered short-read unitigs, which are then reduced to a long-read overlap graph G. Edges are removed from G to obtain first a consistent orientation and then a DAG. Using heuristics based on properties of proper interval graphs, contigs are extracted as maximum weight paths. These are translated into genomic sequence only in the final step. A prototype implementation of LazyBastard, entirely written in python, not only yields significantly more accurate assemblies of the yeast and fruit fly genomes compared to state-of-the-art pipelines but also requires much less computational effort. FundingRSF / Helmholtz Association 18-44-06201; Deutsche Academische Austauschdienst, DFG STA 850/19-2 within SPP 1738; German Federal Ministery of Education an Research 031A538A, de.NBI-RBC