NIH software assembles complete genome sequences on-demand
Software opens the door for a greater number of complete genome sequences
National Institutes of Health researchers have developed and released an innovative software tool to assemble truly complete (i.e., gapless) genome sequences from a variety of species. This software, called Verkko, which means 'network' in Finnish, makes the process of assembling complete genome sequences more affordable and accessible. A description of the new software was published today in Nature Biotechnology.
Verkko grew from assembling the first gapless human genome sequence, which was finished last year by the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium, a collaborative project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH.
“We took everything we learned in the T2T project and automated the process,” said NHGRI associate investigator Sergey Koren, Ph.D., who led the creation of Verkko and is senior author on the paper. “Now with Verkko, we can essentially push a button and automatically get a complete genome sequence.”
This page was last updated on Thursday, February 16, 2023