TY - JOUR T1 - BIGMAC: Breaking Inaccurate Genomes and Merging Assembled Contigs for long read metagenomic assembly JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/045690 SP - 045690 AU - Ka-Kit Lam AU - Richard Hall AU - Alicia Clum AU - Satish Rao Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/29/045690.abstract N2 - The problem of de-novo assembly for metagenomes using only long reads is gaining attention. We study whether post-processing metagenomic assemblies with the original input long reads can result in quality improvement. Previous approaches have focused on pre-processing reads and optimizing assemblers. BIGMAC takes an alternative perspective to focus on the post-processing step. Using both the assembled contigs and original long reads as input, BIGMAC first breaks the contigs at potentially mis-assembled locations and subsequently scaffolds contigs. Our experiments on metagenomes assembled from long reads show that BIGMAC can improve assembly quality by reducing the number of mis-assemblies while maintaining/increasing N50 and N75. The software is available at https://github.com/kakitone/BIGMAC ER -