Wengan is a new genome assembler that unlike most of the current long-reads assemblers avoids entirely the all-vs-all read comparison. The key idea behind Wengan is that long-read alignments can be inferred by inferring paths in a sequence graph. To achieve this, Wengan builds a new sequence graph called the Synthetic Scaffolding Graph. The SSG is built from a spectrum of synthetic mate-pair libraries extracted from raw long-reads. Longer alignments are then obtained by performing a transitive reduction of the edges. Another distinct feature of Wengan is that it performs self-validation by following the read information. Wengan identifies miss-assemblies at different steps of the assembly process. For more information about the algorithmic ideas behind Wengan, please read the preprint available in bioRxiv. The software itself is available here.
Contact: Alex di Genova and Marie-France Sagot.
