Nanopore sequencing and the Shasta toolkit enable efficient de novo assembly of eleven human genomes

De novo assembly of a human genome using nanopore long-read sequences has been reported, but it used more than 150,000 CPU hours and weeks of wall-clock time.

To enable rapid human genome assembly, we present Shasta, a de novo long-read assembler, and polishing algorithms named MarginPolish and HELEN.

Using a single PromethION nanopore sequencer and our toolkit, we assembled 11 highly contiguous human genomes de novo in 9 days.

We achieved roughly 63x coverage, 42-kb read N50 values and 6.5x coverage in reads >100 kb using three flow cells per sample.

Shasta produced a complete haploid human genome assembly in under 6 h on a single commercial compute node. MarginPolish and HELEN polished haploid assemblies to more than 99.9% identity (Phred quality score QV = 30) with nanopore reads alone. Addition of proximity-ligation sequencing enabled near chromosome-level scaffolds for all 11 genomes.

We compare our assembly performance to existing methods for diploid, haploid and trio-binned human samples and report superior accuracy and speed.