Contiguity: Contig adjacency graph construction and visualisation

Contiguity is an interactive software for the visualization and manipulation of de novo genome assemblies. Contiguity creates and displays information on contig adjacency which is contextualized by the simultaneous display of a comparison between assembled contigs and reference sequence. Where scaffolders allow unambiguous connections between contigs to be resolved into a single scaffold, Contiguity allows the user to create all potential scaffolds in ambiguous regions of the genome. This enables the resolution of novel sequence or structural variants from the assembly. In addition, Contiguity provides a sequencing and assembly agnostic approach for the creation of contig adjacency graphs. To maximize the number of contig adjacencies determined, Contiguity combines information from read pair mappings, sequence overlap and De Bruijn graph exploration. We demonstrate how highly sensitive graphs can be achieved using this method. Contig adjacency graphs allow the user to visualize potential arrangements of contigs in unresolvable areas of the genome. By combining adjacency information with comparative genomics, Contiguity provides an intuitive approach for exploring and improving sequence assemblies. It is also useful in guiding manual closure of long read sequence assemblies. Contiguity is an open source application, implemented using Python and the Tkinter GUI package that can run on any Unix, OSX and Windows operating system. It has been designed and optimized for bacterial assemblies. Contiguity is available at http://mjsull.github.io/Contiguity .