New blog post! metaMDBG (@gaetanbenoit.bsky.social) and Myloasm (@jimshaw.bsky.social) have had recent releases, so I updated the benchmarks from the Autocycler paper: rrwick.github.io/2025/09/23/a... Both tools improved considerably! Time to update your conda environments 😄

Excited to share our latest preprint on agtools, an open-source Python framework for analysing and manipulating assembly graphs. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #Bioinformatics #genomics #assembly #assemblygraphs #software

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

New blog post! I added a new feature to @gbouras13.bsky.social's Pypolca: homopolymer-only polishing. Potentially useful for cross-sample polishing - early test on Cryptosporidium looks promising. Check it out here: rrwick.github.io/2025/09/04/h...

Pleased to say that our preprint benchmarking Nanopore data for MLST, cgMLST, cgSNP & AMR typing from bacterial isolates is out! TL;DR you can get almost perfect results from 50x depth using live SUP basecalling with a GPU in under 20 hours #microsky#IDsky 🦠🧬🖥️ /1 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Minor new release of @nanoporetech.com's Dorado: github.com/nanoporetech... It supports using --bacteria when polishing an assembly with v5.2.0 data, which is nice! But if I understand correctly, it's the same bacterial polishing model from Sep 2024, not a new model.

A new long-read metagenome assembler has been released: myloasm. Very exciting! Looking forward to trying it out.

Announcing myloasm, a new long-read (ONT R10/PacBio) metagenome assembler that I've been working on during my postdoc in the Heng Li lab (@lh3lh3.bsky.social). myloasm-docs.github.io

New blog post! In it, I benchmark the new version of Dorado from @nanoporetech.com, which comes with new DNA basecalling models. Short version: big accuracy gains for hac, small improvements for sup. Check it out for the full results: rrwick.github.io/2025/05/27/d...

New version of Dorado is out: github.com/nanoporetech... And for the first time in a year, this includes new DNA basecalling models! I'll try out these new models (v5.2.0) and compare them to the previous ones (v5.0.0) in a blog post in the near future.

New preprint! Autocycler is a tool for long-read consensus assembly of bacterial genomes. It's like Trycycler but can be run fully automated (without any human intervention). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/6)

Delighted to see this paper from danderson123.bsky.social 's PhD out. We have been building tools for AMR gene detection for over a decade now, but multicopy genes remain challenging. Dan shows that with a gene-space de Bruijn graph and long reads, you can do well www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Do you (like me) create a bunch of conda environments, then later forget what they're for, when they were last updated, or which tools are in them? If so, you might this little project: github.com/rrwick/conda...

New preprint is out! We investigate how well you can call variants directly from genome assemblies compared to traditional read-based variant calling. Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Data & code: github.com/rrwick/Are-r... (1/8)

I re-ran previous ONT basecalling benchmarks using the latest version of Dorado (thanks, @vellamike.bsky.social), and the RTX 40 series GPUs show an impressive speed boost! Check out the updated benchmark results at the bottom of this post: rrwick.github.io/2024/08/16/s...

Dorado now supports bacterial genome polishing. It can output assemblies in FASTQ, including Q scores. @rrwick.bsky.social 's analysis shows Q scores are well correlated with base call reliability, meaning they can help reduce false positives in variant calling. rrwick.github.io/2025/02/19/f...

A quick reminder: if CheckM reports an assembly as <100% complete and >0% contaminated, that doesn't necessarily mean it's incomplete or contaminated. Here are RefSeq's CheckM results for a genome I'm confident is 100% complete and 0% contaminated.

New blog post! Ever seen a genome assembly in FASTQ format instead of FASTA? Dorado polish from @nanoporetech.com can do it, and I took a closer look: rrwick.github.io/2025/02/19/f...

Dorado v0.9.1 now includes a bacterial model for genome polishing, so I put it to the test! How does it compare to Medaka? And does move-table data improve polishing accuracy? Read my analysis here: rrwick.github.io/2025/02/07/d...

Do you make core genome alignments for phylogenomics? Mona Taouk and I explored how including sites with some missing data (a soft core) can improve analysis, especially for large datasets. www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... (1/4)

New year, new assemblies! I'm excited to announce Autocycler, my new tool for consensus assembly of long-read bacterial genomes! It's the successor to Trycycler, designed to be faster and less reliant on user intervention. Check it out: github.com/rrwick/Autoc... (1/5)

New release of Canu - first one in over 3 years! github.com/marbl/canu/r... The notes say this will be the very last release. Many thanks to its devs Brian Walenz and @sergek.bsky.social. Canu may be a bit old and it's certainly not fast, but it makes good assemblies and so I still use it!

Intrigued by the new dorado polish command! I'm curious how it compares to Medaka's bacterial methylation model, which I've found to be very good.

Just had my first experience with CycloneSEQ data and shared my findings in this blog post: rrwick.github.io/2024/12/17/c... How does CycloneSEQ compare to @nanoporetech.com? I looked at both read-level and consensus-level accuracy. Check it out!

I've been playing around with LRGE this week and am impressed. It's fast!