Effect of sequence filtering on the assembly of the Bacillus altitudinis 19RS3 genome isolated from Ilex paraguariensis

Abstract

Sequence filtering is an essential step regardless of the type of technology applied for sequencing a genome, in which low-quality readings or a portion are eliminated. In an assembly, the construction of a genome is carried out from the union of short reads in contigs. Some assemblers measure the relationship between sequences of a fixed length (k-mer) that can be affected by the presence of low-quality sequences. A common approach to evaluating assemblies is based on the analysis of the number of contigs, the length of the longest contig, and the value of N50 defined as the length of the contig representing 50 % of the length of the assembly. In this context, the objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of the use of crude and filtered reads on the values of the quality parameters obtained from the genome assembly of Bacillus altituidinis 19RS3 isolated from Ilex paraguariensis. The quality analysis of both starting files was performed with the FastqC software and the readings were filtered with the Trimmomatic software. The SPAdes software was used for the assembly and the QUAST tool for its evaluation. The best assembly for B. altitudinis 19RS3 was obtained from the filtered readings with the value of k-mer 79, which generated 16 contigs greater than 500 bp with a N50 of 931 914 bp and the longest contig of 966 271 bp.