Motivation: Genomics has revolutionized biological research, but quality assessment of the resulting assembled sequences is complicated and remains mostly limited to technical measures like N50.
Results: We propose a measure for quantitative assessment of genome assembly and annotation completeness based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content. We implemented the assessment procedure in open-source software, with sets of Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs, named BUSCO.
Availability and implementation: Software implemented in Python and datasets available for download from http://busco.ezlab.org.
Contact: evgeny.zdobnov@unige.ch
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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