The complex task of choosing a de novo assembly: Lessons from fungal genomes

The success of a short-read based genome assembly process in faithfully reproducing the sequences of a real genome, or its genes, can be modulated by some or all of three key parameters: read length r, insert size I, and a bioinformatics parameter, the word length k (k-mer length), which is used in most modern assembly tools based on de Bruijn graphs. The present study focuses on how plots of simple assembly success metrics, and their variation as a function of k, can serve as succinct graphical representations of how the assembly process deals with a given genomic context.