Parallel and memory-efficient reads indexing for genome assembly

Rayan Chikhi (1) , Guillaume Chapuis (1) , Dominique Lavenier (1)

1 SYMBIOSE - Biological systems and models, bioinformatics and sequences

As genomes, transcriptomes and meta-genomes are being sequenced at a faster pace than ever, there is a pressing need for efficient genome assembly methods. Two practical issues in assembly are heavy memory usage and long execution time during the read indexing phase. In this article, a parallel and memory-efficient method is proposed for reads indexing prior to assembly. Specifically, a hash-based structure that stores a reduced amount of read information is designed. Erroneous entries are filtered on the fly during index construction. A prototype implementation has been designed and applied to actual Illumina short reads. Benchmark evaluation shows that this indexing method requires significantly less memory than those from popular assemblers.

Domaines: Bio-informatique [q-bio.QM]; Bio-Informatique, Biologie Systémique [q-bio.QM]

Rayan Chikhi, Guillaume Chapuis, Dominique Lavenier. Parallel and memory-efficient reads indexing for genome assembly. Parallel Bio-Computing 2011, Sep 2011, torun, Poland. ⟨inria-00637536⟩