Assessment the Quality of Genome Assemblies by using QUAST Tool for Metagenomics

Abstract

Number of assembly algorithms have emerged out but due to constraints of genome sequencing techniques no one is perfect. Various methods for assembler’s comparison have been developed, but none is yet a recognized standard. The problem of evaluating assemblies of formerly unsequenced species has not been considered, because mostly existing methods for comparing assemblies are only applicable to new assemblies of finished genomes. For comparing and evaluating genome assemblies we have used QUAST (Quality Assessment Tool). This tool is used to assess the quality of leading assembly software by evaluating quality metrics. Assemblies with a reference genome, as well as without a reference can be evaluated by QUAST tool. For genome assembly evaluation based on alignment of contigs to a reference, it is a modern tool. In this study we demonstrate QUAST performance by comparing several leading genome assemblers on three metagenomic datasets.