MetaVelvet : An extension of Velvet assembler to de novo metagenome assembly from short sequence reads v1

Motivation:An important step of "metagenomics" analysis is the assembly of multiple genomes from mixed sequence reads of multiple species in a microbial community. Most conventional pipelines employ a single-genome assembler with carefully optimized parameters and post-process the resulting scaffolds to correct assembly errors. Limitations of the use of a single-genome assembler forde novometagenome assembly are that highly conserved sequences shared between different species often causes chimera contigs, and sequences of highly abundant species are likely mis-identified as repeats in a single genome. Methods:We modified and extended a single-genome and de Bruijn-graph based assembler,Velvet, forde novometagenome assembly. Our fundamental ideas are first decomposing de Bruijn graph constructed from mixed short reads into individual sub-graphs and second building scaffolds based on every decomposed de Bruijn sub-graph as isolate species genome.