Racon

Racon refines raw contigs produced by rapid de novo assemblers to generate high-quality consensus genomic sequences.

Key Features:

• Error Correction and Consensus Generation: Enhances accuracy of contig assemblies by refining raw outputs from rapid assembly tools to produce genomic consensus sequences.
• Speed Efficiency: Delivers substantially increased processing speed compared to conventional methods that include both error correction and consensus steps.
• Compatibility with Long Reads: Supports long-read sequencing data from Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore Technologies for polishing assemblies.

Scientific Applications:

• Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) of complex plant genomes: Used to improve assemblies of large, repetitive plant genomes by leveraging long reads to reduce gaps and better span repetitive regions.
• Assembly polishing for Sorghum bicolor (Oxford Nanopore MinION): Applied to contigs generated from MinION long-read data to increase assembly quality and completeness.

Methodology:

Applied after initial assembly with Canu, Minimap2, and Miniasm to polish contigs generated from MinION long-read data (~25× coverage) and improve consensus quality.