Assembly polishing is the processing of a draft sequence assembly, typically a draft genome. It typically involves analysing a draft assembly (or region assembly) to remove artefacts of the assembly process and improve local accuracy and overall consensus accuracy of the draft assembled sequence.

Consensus generation can also be applied to specific regions of interest, by combining multiple exact copies of a single original fragment or molecule into a single high-quality sequence.

Tools used to generate the draft assembled sequence may have specific recommendations as to which tools should be used to polish the respective assembly.

DNA sequence assembly and polishing is implemented in a number of EPI2ME workflows. The wf-bacterial-genomes workflow has been implemented for the assembly and characterisation of bacterial genomes and the wf-clone-validation workflow has been implemented for the assembly, polishing and annotation of cloning plasmids.