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Autocycler: long-read consensus assembly for bacterial genomes

2025· article· en· W4413814807 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Ryan R. Wick, Benjamin P. Howden, Timothy P. Stinear

Bibliographic record

VenueBioinformatics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicGenomics and Phylogenetic Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNational Health and Medical Research CouncilInstitute of Infection and ImmunityCenters for Disease Control and PreventionState Government of Victoria
KeywordsComputer scienceContigBacterial genome sizeSequence assemblyNanopore sequencingScalabilityDe Bruijn graphGenomeAutomationDe Bruijn sequenceSoftwareData miningLevenshtein distanceGraphComputational biologyArtificial intelligenceTheoretical computer scienceProgramming languageBiologyDatabaseGeneticsEngineeringGene

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

MOTIVATION: Long-read sequencing enables complete bacterial genome assemblies, but individual assemblers are imperfect and often produce sequence-level and structural errors. Consensus assembly using Trycycler can improve accuracy, but its lack of automation limits scalability. There is a need for an automated method to generate high-quality consensus bacterial genome assemblies from long-read data. RESULTS: We present Autocycler, a command-line tool for generating accurate bacterial genome assemblies by combining multiple alternative long-read assemblies of the same genome. Without requiring user input, Autocycler builds a compacted De Bruijn graph from the input assemblies, clusters and filters contigs, trims overlaps, and resolves consensus sequences by selecting the most common variant at each locus. It also supports manual curation when desired, allowing users to refine assemblies in challenging or important cases. In our evaluation using Oxford Nanopore Technologies reads from five bacterial isolates, Autocycler outperformed individual assemblers, automated pipelines, and other consensus tools, producing assemblies with lower error rates and improved structural accuracy. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Autocycler is implemented in Rust, open-source, and freely available at github.com/rrwick/Autocycler. It runs on Linux and macOS and is extensively documented.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.012
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.040

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.012
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0030.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.002
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.002
Open science0.0030.002
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0120.018

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.258
Teacher spread0.244 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations43
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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