High Quality, Highly Contiguous Genome Assemblies Now

We have developed an efficient approach for high-quality genome assembly using only generic high-throughput Illumina sequence data. The key to our approach is generation of a Chicago library, via in vitro proximity ligation, that simultaneously reveals genome contiguity at a range of distances up to the size of input DNA. Using these data and a sophisticated genome assembly pipeline called HiRise, we have generated dozens of highly contiguous, highly accurate genome assembles from a wide variety of genomes from across the plant and animal kingdoms. This streamlined approach reduces the total time for de novo genome assembly to under 10 weeks. I will highlight recent improvements in our technique including reduced input requirements, gap-filling, quality assessment, and highlight the biological discovery possible when genomes are assembled at multi-megabase scaffold N50s which we routinely achieve.