Benchmarking state-of-the-art approaches for norovirus genome assembly in metagenome sample

Motivation: A recently published article in BMC Genomics by Fuentes-Trilloet al (2021) contains a comparison of assembly approaches of several Noroviral samples via different tools and preprocessing strategies. Unfortunately the study used outdated versions of tools as well as tools that were not designed for the viral assembly task. In order to improve the suboptimal assemblies authors suggested different sophisticated preprocessing strategies that seem to make onlyminor contributions to the results. We redone the analysis using state-of-the arttools designed for viral assembly. Results: : Here we demonstrate that tools from the SPAdes toolkit(rnaviralSPAdes and coronaSPAdes) allows one to assemble the samplesfrom the original study into a single contig without any additional preprocessing.