Gene Myers, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany

The Resurrection of de novo DNA sequencing
While the development of next-generation sequencing systems has drastically reduced the cost per base of DNA sequencing, the short read lengths of these systems has meant that de novo sequencing efforts produce very fractured assemblies, or so-called “Swiss Cheese” genomes.  Fortunately, the next-next-generation systems are very long read systems, albeit with very high error rates (15%) compared to what most assembly algorithms have been designed for (1%).  In this lecture, we will introduce the technology, describe the characteristics of the input data, present an overview of a new assembler for this data, and conclude with some examples of our algorithm’s performance on giga-base genomes.