Finding bogus bioinformatics acronyms sometimes requires a laser-like focus

A new paper has been published in the journal BMC Research Notes:

• LASER: Large genome ASsembly EvaluatoR

This name is:

1. Bogus — the word 'genome' doesn't contribute any letters to 'LASER' and two letters ('S' and 'R') are not derived from the initial letters of words.
2. Duplicated — there are at least two other bioinformatics tools called LASER (see here and here).
3. Undiscoverable — you really need to search Google for LASER genome assembly before you see this as a top result.
4. Ambiguous — large is a very subjective term. The authors imply that LASER is suitable for human genomes. These are larger than some genomes but smaller than others.
5. Inconsistent — the paper reveals that LASER is built on the code of QUAST (Quality Assessment Tool for Genome Assemblies). This means you end up with the somewhat bizarre documentation for how to run the program called LASER:

The example included with LASER installation can be run as:

./quast.py testdata/contigs1.fasta testdata/contigs2.fasta \ -R testdata/reference.fasta.gz -G testdata/genes.txt \ -O test_data/operons.txt

The output of LASER program can be viewed in file: ./quast_results/latest/report.txt

So to run LASER just type 'quast'!