New paper provides a great overview of the current state of genome assembly

The following paper by Stephen Richards and Shwetha Murali has just appeared in the journal Current Opinion in Insect Science:

Best practices in insect genome sequencing: what works and what doesn’t

In some ways I wish they had chosen a different title as the focus of this paper is much more about genome assembly than genome sequencing. Furthermore, it provides a great overview of all of the current strategies in genome assembly. This should be of interest to any non-insect researchers interested in the best way of putting a genome together. Here is part of the legend from a very informative table in the paper:

Table 1 — De novo genome assembly strategies:
Assembly software is designed for a specific sequencing and assembly strategy. Thus sequence must be generated with the assembly software and algorithm in mind, choosing a sequence strategy designed for a different assembly algorithm, or sequencing without thinking about assembly is usually a recipe for poor un-publishable assemblies. Here we survey different assembly strategies, with different sequence and library construction requirements.