# zbMATH — the first resource for mathematics

Safe and complete contig assembly via omnitigs. (English) Zbl 1355.92070
Singh, Mona (ed.), Research in computational molecular biology. 20th annual conference, RECOMB 2016, Santa Monica, CA, USA, April 17–21, 2016. Proceedings. Cham: Springer (ISBN 978-3-319-31956-8/pbk; 978-3-319-31957-5/ebook). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9649. Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 152-163 (2016).
Summary: Contig assembly is the first stage that most assemblers solve when reconstructing a genome from a set of reads. Its output consists of contigs – a set of strings that are promised to appear in any genome that could have generated the reads. From the introduction of contigs 20 years ago, assemblers have tried to obtain longer and longer contigs, but the following question was never solved: given a genome graph $$G$$ (e.g. a de Bruijn, or a string graph), what are all the strings that can be safely reported from $$G$$ as contigs? In this paper we finally answer this question, and also give a polynomial time algorithm to find them. Our experiments show that these strings, which we call omnitigs, are 66 % to 82 % longer on average than the popular unitigs, and 29 % of dbSNP locations have more neighbors in omnitigs than in unitigs.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1334.92007].

##### MSC:
 92D10 Genetics and epigenetics 92-08 Computational methods for problems pertaining to biology 05C90 Applications of graph theory
##### Keywords:
contig assembly; omnitigs; genome graph; assemblers