Top Ten Genomes - (ix) Pacific oyster

Some genomes are so difficult to assemble, they are remembered by scientists trying to assemble them for all their life. Ruibang Luo at BGI possibly had such a shocking experience with pacific oyster, because it was the first genome he mentioned after my talk at Hong Kong University. Baylor genome center experienced similar difficulties with the urchin genome and Jeramiah Smith did not find the lamprey genome any easier.

High degree of heterozygosity is the common theme among those three genomes. Almost all assembly programs assume two copies of chromosomes to be identical. Therefore, when someone tries to run an existing program like SOAPdenovo on pacific oyster or lamprey, he comes up with very tiny contigs fragmented by ‘bubbles’ (an algorithmic term for de Bruijn graph-based assemblers).

Dipspades module within SPAdes is one of the few existing programs, which can handle such assemblies algorithmically. However, SPAdes assembler cannot scale well for large assemblies yet. The other option is to get a Pacbio sequencing instrument, which appears to be the direction chosen by BGI.

BGI Adopts Single Molecule, Real-Time Sequencing from Pacific Biosciences

Pacific oyster genome wins our nomination as a representative of highly polymorphic genome. Apart from being a nightmare for bioinformaticians, such genomes also raise interesting biological questions, such as how do those organisms manage to survive with such rapidly changing genomes. If 80% of genomes were functional, one of those changes will hit a functional region very soon and make the organism defective. Therefore, it is likely that the organisms will head extinction much more rapidly than those with stable genomes.