Assembly of Long Error-Prone Reads Using de Bruijn Graphs

Abstract

The recent breakthroughs in assembling long error-prone reads (such as reads generated by Single Molecule Real Time technology) were based on the overlap-layout-consensus approach and did not utilize the strengths of the alternative de Bruijn graph approach to genome assembly. Moreover, these studies often assume that applications of the de Bruijn graph approach are limited to short and accurate reads and that the overlap-layout-consensus approach is the only practical paradigm for assembling long error-prone reads. Below we show how to generalize de Bruijn graphs to assemble long error-prone reads and describe the ABruijn assembler, which results in more accurate genome reconstructions than the existing state-of-the-art algorithms.