Quality Assessment Using BUSCO v2

An important driving force behind genome projects is the acquisition of a complete catalog of genes, thus, it is vital to assess the integrity and completeness of the assembled genome. Although indications of assembly quality may be gleaned from statistical measures, a key measure of assembly quality is completeness in terms of the expected gene content. The identification of genes from many diverse species that are evolving under single-copy control defines an evolutionarily-informed expectation regarding gene content. Selected from the major species clades of the OrthoDB catalog of orthologs, the Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCOs) defines sets of genes expected to be present in any newly-sequenced genome from the appropriate species clade. The BUSCO assessment tool implements a computational pipeline to identify and classify matches from genome assemblies, annotated gene sets, or transcriptomes. The new version offers improved features and greatly expands the number of clades covered by BUSCO, including plants and protists. During this demonstration we will show how BUSCO can be used to facilitate genomic research, including examples on: de novo assemblies, re-annotation, assembly updates and phylogenetic analyses.

Project website: http://busco.ezlab.org/v2/