Ryan Wick from the University of Melbourne spoke at the Nanopore Community Meeting 2017. They explained that assemblies still fail. The title of the session is “Assembly is still hard: challenges in genome assembly in the era of long reads.” Wick shared an example of a bacterial genome sequence that leads to inaccuracy in sequencing. There are regions with repeats that Nanopolish struggles with. Wick shared examples and ideas to improve and make use of resources. Unicycler prefers 50-100 depth, Wick explained, which is why they developed FiltLong to identify a subset of sequences with higher quality for assembly. One question asked was how this process would work for single genomes or metagenomes. This session helped me think about challenges with genome assembly and the people creating the tools to overcome barriers.
