BACKGROUND: Local assembly with short and long reads has proven to be very useful in many applications: reconstruction of the sequence of a locus of interest, gap-filling in draft assemblies, as well as alternative allele reconstruction of large Structural Variants. Whereas linked-read technologies have a great potential to assemble specific loci as they provide long-range information while maintaining the power and accuracy of short-read sequencing, there is a lack of local assembly tools for linked-read data. RESULTS: We present MTG-Link, a novel local assembly tool dedicated to linked-reads. The originality of the method lies in its read subsampling step which takes advantage of the barcode information contained in linked-reads mapped in flanking regions. We validated our approach on several datasets from different linked-read technologies. We show that MTG-Link is able to assemble successfully large sequences, up to dozens of Kb. We also demonstrate that the read subsampling step of MTG-Link considerably improves the local assembly of specific loci compared to other existing short-read local assembly tools. Furthermore, MTG-Link was able to fully characterize large insertion variants and deletion breakpoints in a human genome and to reconstruct dark regions in clinically-relevant human genes. It also improved the contiguity of a 1.3 Mb locus of biological interest in several individual genomes of the mimetic butterfly Heliconius numata. CONCLUSIONS: MTG-Link is an efficient local assembly tool designed for different linked-read sequencing technologies. MTG-Link source code is available at https://github.com/anne-gcd/MTG-Link and as a Bioconda package.

UNLABELLED: AphidBase aims to (i) store recently acquired genomic resources on aphids and (ii) compare them to other insect resources as functional annotation tools. For that, the Drosophila melanogaster genome has been loaded in the database using the GMOD open source software for a comparison with the 17 069 pea aphid unique transcripts (contigs) and the 13 639 gene transcripts of the Anopheles gambiae. Links to FlyBase and A.gambiae Entrez databases allow a rapid characterization of the putative functions of the aphid sequences. Text mining of the D.melanogaster literature was performed to construct a network of co-cited gene or protein names, which should facilitate functional annotation of aphid homolog sequences. AphidBase represents one of the first genomic databases for a hemipteran insect. AVAILABILITY: http://w3.rennes.inra.fr/AphidBase.