The lion's share of bacteria in various environments cannot be cloned in the laboratory and thus cannot be sequenced using existing technologies. A major goal of single-cell genomics is to complement gene-centric metagenomic data with whole-genome assemblies of uncultivated organisms. Assembly of single-cell data is challenging because of highly non-uniform read coverage as well as elevated levels of sequencing errors and chimeric reads. We describe SPAdes, a new assembler for both single-cell and standard (multicell) assembly, and demonstrate that it improves on the recently released E+V-SC assembler (specialized for single-cell data) and on popular assemblers Velvet and SoapDeNovo (for multicell data). SPAdes generates single-cell assemblies, providing information about genomes of uncultivatable bacteria that vastly exceeds what may be obtained via traditional metagenomics studies. SPAdes is available online (http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades). It is distributed as open source software.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)455-477
Number of pages23
JournalJournal of Computational Biology
Volume19
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 May 2012

    Scopus subject areas

  • Modelling and Simulation
  • Molecular Biology
  • Genetics
  • Computational Mathematics
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

    Research areas

  • assembly, bacteria, de Bruijn graph, sequencing, single cell

ID: 5518803