RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 NxTrim: optimized trimming of Illumina mate pair reads JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 007666 DO 10.1101/007666 A1 Jared O’Connell A1 Ole Schulz-Trieglaff A1 Emma Carlson A1 Matthew M. Hims A1 Niall A. Gormley A1 Anthony J. Cox YR 2014 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/08/06/007666.abstract AB Motivation Mate pair protocols add to the utility of paired-end sequencing by boosting the genomic distance spanned by each pair of reads, potentially allowing larger repeats to be bridged and resolved. The Illumina Nextera Mate Pair (NMP) protocol employs a circularisation-based strategy that leaves behind 38bp adapter sequences which must be computationally removed from the data. While “adapter trimming” is a well-studied area of bioinformatics, existing tools do not fully exploit the particular properties of NMP data and discard more data than is necessary.Results We present NxTrim, a tool that strives to discard as little sequence as possible from NMP reads. The sequence either side of the adapter site is triaged into “virtual libraries” of mate pairs, paired-end reads and single-ended reads. When combined, these data boost coverage and can substantially improve the de novo assembly of bacterial genomes.Availability The source code is available at https://github.com/sequencing/NxTrimContact acox{at}illumina.com