PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Coline C. Jaworski
AU  - Carson W. Allan
AU  - Luciano M. Matzkin
TI  - Chromosome-level hybrid <em>de novo</em> genome assemblies as an attainable option for non-model organisms
AID  - 10.1101/748228
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 748228
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/28/748228.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/28/748228.full
AB  - The emergence of third generation sequencing (3GS; long-reads) is making closer the goal of chromosome-size fragments in de novo genome assemblies. This allows the exploration of new and broader questions on genome evolution for a number of non-model organisms. However, long-read technologies result in higher sequencing error rates and therefore impose an elevated cost of sufficient coverage to achieve high enough quality. In this context, hybrid assemblies, combining short-reads and long-reads provide an alternative efficient and cost-effective approach to generate de novo, chromosome-level genome assemblies. The array of available software programs for hybrid genome assembly, sequence correction and manipulation is constantly being expanded and improved. This makes it difficult for non-experts to find efficient, fast and tractable computational solutions for genome assembly, especially in the case of non-model organisms lacking a reference genome or one from a closely related species. In this study, we review and test the most recent pipelines for hybrid assemblies, comparing the model organism Drosophila melanogaster to a non-model cactophilic Drosophila, D. mojavensis. We show that it is possible to achieve excellent contiguity on this non-model organism using the DBG2OLC pipeline.