A tool for assembling the metagenomic shotgun sequencing reads

摘要

@@Ever since the initial shotgun sequencing projects of metagenomes were launched, the assembly process has been applied on many of them, owing to the more valuable genomic content it can provide. Assembly of reads can improve the quality of the materials used in down-stream analysis such as gene start prediction and gene finding. Recently, some metagenome projects that obtained their data through pyrosequencing, mainly the 454 sequencing, also assembled shorter reads (100-400 bp) instead of Sanger's longer reads (600-1000 bp), while some of them only compared the reads against the reference database as the basis of further genomic, taxonomic or functional analysis, mainly due to the poor quality of the assembly of the short reads. However, as the pyrosequencing tech gradually improve its ability of generating longer reads, assembly process will become normal in the metagenomic research.