

Why do we want to assemble an organism’s DNA? ¶ĭetermining the DNA sequence of an organism is useful in fundamental research into why and how they live, as well as in applied subjects. These repeats can be thousands of nucleotides long, and some occur in thousands of different locations, especially in the large genomes of plants and animals. Genome assembly is a very difficult computational problem, made more difficult because many genomes contain large numbers of identical sequences, known as repeats. See this document for an explanation of the de Bruijn graph genome assembler “Velvet.”
#RUN TIMES OF CLC GENOMICS WORKBENCH SOFTWARE#
The mechanisms used by assembly software are varied but the most common type for short reads is assembly by de Bruijn graph.

The distances between pairs of a set of paired end reads is useful information for this purpose. The contigs are sometimes then ordered and oriented in relation to one another to form scaffolds. The goal of a sequence assembler is to produce long contiguous pieces of sequence (contigs) from these reads. (The known separation distance is actually a distribution with a mean and standard deviation as not all original fragments are of the same length.) This extra information contained in the paired end reads can be useful for helping to tie pieces of sequence together during the assembly process. One from the left hand end of a fragment and one from the right with a known separation distance between them. Paired end reads are produced when the fragment size used in the sequencing process is much longer (typically 250 - 500 bp long) and the ends of the fragment are read in towards the middle. These reads can be either “single ended” as described above or “paired end.” A good summary of other types of DNA sequencing can be found here. Typically for Illumina type short read sequencing, reads of length 36 - 150 bp are produced. These “reads” vary from 20 to 1000 nucleotide base pairs (bp) in length depending on the sequencing method used. In a genome sequencing project, the DNA of the target organism is broken up into millions of small pieces and read on a sequencing machine. De novo genome assemblies assume no prior knowledge of the source DNA sequence length, layout or composition. Genome assembly refers to the process of taking a large number of short DNA sequences and putting them back together to create a representation of the original chromosomes from which the DNA originated. In this protocol we discuss and outline the process of de novo assembly for small to medium sized genomes. Written and maintained by Simon Gladman - Melbourne Bioinformatics (formerly VLSCI) Protocol Overview / Introduction ¶ Molecular Dynamics - Building input files, visualising the trajectoryĭe novo Genome Assembly for Illumina Data ¶ Protocol ¶ Molecular Dynamics - Introduction to cluster computing Identifying proteins from mass spectrometry data RNAseq differential expression tool comparision (Galaxy) Introduction to Metabarcoding using Qiime2 Hybrid genome assembly - Nanopore and Illumina Possible tools for improving your assemblies:ĭe novo assembly of Illumina reads using Velvet (Galaxy)ĭe novo assembly of Illumina reads using Spades (Galaxy) Genomics Virtual Laboratory resources for this protocol.Įxamine the quality of your raw read files.Įxamine the draft contigs and assessment of the assembly quality. Why do we want to assemble an organism’s DNA? Introduction to de novo genome assembly for Illumina reads Introduction to de novo assembly with Velvet Common Workflow Language for Bioinformatics
