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How do I assemble PacBio and NanoPore reads

Flye is a de novo assembler tuned for error-prone long reads such as those produced by Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencers.

  1. Create a new Assembly Project FILE | NEW | ASSEMBLY PROJECT
  2. Click on the Add Reads button to add PacBio or Oxford Nanopore reads in fasta, fastq or gzipped (.gz) format.
  3. Double-click on the Status column of the imported read file(s) and set the data type to "PacBio" or "Oxford Nanopore" as appropriate.
  4. Select the file(s) you want to assemble and click on the Flye toolbar button.
  5. Set the Expected genome size to the approximate size of the genome size you are using. If in doubt, err on the small side.
  6. Choose a suitable Initial minimum coverage. This, along with Expected genome size, is one of the two most critical parameters. The default is 50, but you may try as low as 20 or as high as 500. Sometimes, depending on your input data, even the difference between 50 and 60 can be important. In general, larger is typically better, at the expense of longer processing time, but there are many occasions where smaller values do best.

See the Flye help topic for more details.

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