Parallel NGS assembly using distributed assembly graphs enriched with biological knowledge

High performance computing has become essential for many biomedical applications as the production of biological data continues to increase. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies are capable of producing millions to even billions of short DNA fragments called reads. These short reads are assembled into larger sequences called contigs by graph theoretic software tools called assemblers. High performance computing has been applied to reduce the computational burden of several steps of the NGS data assembly process. Several parallel de Bruijn graph assemblers rely on a distributed assembly graph. However, the majority of assemblers that utilize distributed assembly graphs do not take the input properties of the data set into consideration to improve the graph partitioning process. Furthermore, the graph theoretic foundation for the majority of these assemblers is a distributed de Bruijn graph. In this paper, we introduce a distributed overlap graph based model upon which our parallel assembler Focus is built. The contribution of this paper is three-fold. First, we demonstrate that the application of data specific knowledge regarding the inherent linearity of DNA sequences can be used to improve the partitioning processes for distributing the assembly graph. Second, we implement several parallel graph algorithms for assembly with greatly improved speedup. Finally, we demonstrate that for metagenomics datasets, the graph partitioning provides insights into the structure of the microbial community.