# Ideas for assembling [long] reads


Here is an idea for an algorithm to assemble long reads.

1. Go over all sequences and sketch their windows using the Hamming distance preserving sketch method described here. This method may need some tweaking to also work with an indel rate of around 10%.

2. Let’s say we find a pair of matching windows between reads $$A$$ and $$B$$ starting at positions $$i$$ and $$j$$. This indicates that $$A$$ and $$B$$ may be related with an offset of $$j-i$$.

3. For each pair of reads, keep track of all potential offsets. We don’t need to keep the list of exact offsets. Instead, we can bucket them into buckets of size $$\O(\sqrt{|A|})$$.

In particular, for two reads $$A$$ and $$B$$ that overlap on $$n$$ basepairs where each of them has an indel rate of $$p=0.1$$, we can crudely model the deviation of the offset as a random walk on $$\Z$$, where for each pair of nucleotides there is a $$0.1$$ chance of moving from $$n$$ to $$n+1$$ and $$0.1$$ change of moving to $$n-1$$.

One property of such a random walk is that the expected deviation from $$0$$ is of order $$\sqrt n$$. Thus, when we bucket all candidate overlaps into buckets of size $$\sqrt n$$ we expect one (or possibly two adjacent) bucket(s) to contain all the true positive pairs of matching windows.

4. For each pair of reads, find the buckets with count significantly higher than the expected noise coming from false positives.

5. A true positive offset gives rise to an alignment of the two reads. We only know the start of the alignment with precision $$\sqrt n$$, but this is sufficient to quickly (after processing $$\O(\sqrt n)$$ basepairs) converge to the actual offset.

6. Build the overlay graph.

7. Assemble using the overlay graph. This could be done using existing methods.

(Dealing with long repeats is the tricky part here, where sequences may overlap but not actually match in practice. Also, there are two copies of all DNA because of duplicate chromosomes, which need to be taken into account.)

Some further thoughts:

• The ideal goal would be to make a memory efficient algorithm that can assemble the human genome (3GB assembled, 180GB gzipped reads) on consumer hardware (64GB ram, 12 cores, possibly a midrange video card if needed).

• The algorithm could do multiple passes over the data: the entire human genome is only 3GB so this easily fits in memory, even with additional metadata. Building a crude reference genome on the first pass and aligning/improving this in consecutive passes could make it work with limited RAM.

• There seem to be multiple ways of dealing with potentially matching windows:

1. Try a seeded alignment of the entire reads starting at the two windows.

This may(?) need higher precision window pairs (i.e. fewer false positives) because running an alignment is slow. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be too slow given that we know where to start the alignment.

Repeats may make this method infeasible: the reads may match for half of their overlap, but not on the remainder. Testing the matching windows would take relatively a lot of time.

2. Do not process the matching windows, but directly add their offset to the set of candidate offsets between the two sequences.

This is similar to what is described above. The benefit is that each pair of sequences is only attempted to be aligned once, at the cost of having to store all potential offsets.

3. Do a quick computation to see if the matching windows indeed have a low edit/hamming distance, and if so, add the corresponding offset to the list of found offsets between the two reads.

This may or may not be a good tradeoff between the previous two methods.

One potential problem with processing windows on the fly (as in the first and third option) instead of afterwards only is that both sequences involved need to be loaded in memory, which isn’t feasible (or fast) if the size of the dataset is O(100GB).

• Another way to work around memory restrictions is to process the data in batches. If a batch is significantly larger than the size of the target genome, you can still guarantee plenty of matches.

• In case that storing offsets needs too much memory, the size can be reduced by further reducing the number of windows considered. Alternatively each pair of matching windows could be stored only with a fixed probability, but that feels less efficient.