Soap de novo

SOAP de novo is a novel short-read assembly method that can build a de novo draft assembly for the human-sized genomes. The program is specially designed to assemble Illumina GA short reads. It creates new opportunities for building reference sequences and carrying out accurate analyses of unexplored genomes in a cost effective way. Now the new version is available. SOAPdenovo2, which has the advantage of a new algorithm design that reduces memory consumption in graph construction, resolves more repeat regions in contig assembly, increases coverage and length in scaffold construction, improves gap closing, and optimizes for large genome.

SOAP de novo aims for large plant and animal genomes, although it also works well on bacteria and fungi genomes. It runs on 64-bit Linux system with a minimum of 5G physical memory. For big genomes like human, about 150 GB memory would be required.