FLASH: fast length adjustment of short reads to improve genome assemblies

Bioinformatics. 2011 Nov 1;27(21):2957-63. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btr507. Epub 2011 Sep 7.

Abstract

Motivation: Next-generation sequencing technologies generate very large numbers of short reads. Even with very deep genome coverage, short read lengths cause problems in de novo assemblies. The use of paired-end libraries with a fragment size shorter than twice the read length provides an opportunity to generate much longer reads by overlapping and merging read pairs before assembling a genome.

Results: We present FLASH, a fast computational tool to extend the length of short reads by overlapping paired-end reads from fragment libraries that are sufficiently short. We tested the correctness of the tool on one million simulated read pairs, and we then applied it as a pre-processor for genome assemblies of Illumina reads from the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus and human chromosome 14. FLASH correctly extended and merged reads >99% of the time on simulated reads with an error rate of <1%. With adequately set parameters, FLASH correctly merged reads over 90% of the time even when the reads contained up to 5% errors. When FLASH was used to extend reads prior to assembly, the resulting assemblies had substantially greater N50 lengths for both contigs and scaffolds.

Availability and implementation: The FLASH system is implemented in C and is freely available as open-source code at http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/software/flash.

Contact: t.magoc@gmail.com.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Chromosomes, Human, Pair 14
  • Genome
  • Genomics / methods*
  • Humans
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA*
  • Software*
  • Staphylococcus aureus / genetics