In July 2011, as part of a “Assemblathon” contest, 21 teams submitted 43 attempts to build assemblers to assemble three genomes from scratch: that of a bird (budgerigar), a fish (the Lake Malawi cichlid) and a snake (the boa constrictor).
But different assemblers – and the same assemblers in the hands of different teams – did not give consistent results. And that’s the same thing that happened in previous contest.
Bioinformatician C. Titus Brown of Michigan State University wrote on his blog that “as a field, we have pretended that genome assembly is a reliable exercise and that the results can be trusted; the Assemblathon 2 paper shows that that’s wrong.”
Read the full article here: Genome assembly contest prompts soul-searching
