Background: Pacific Biosciences HiFi read technology is currently the industry standard for high accuracy long-read sequencing that has been widely adopted by large sequencing and assembly initiatives for generation of de novo assemblies in non-model organisms. Though adapter contamination filtering is routine in traditional short-read analysis pipelines, it has not been widely adopted for HiFi workflows.
Results: Analysis of 55 publicly available HiFi datasets revealed that a read-sanitation step to remove sequence artifacts derived from PacBio library preparation from read pools is necessary as adapter sequences can be erroneously integrated into assemblies.
Conclusions: Here we describe the nature of adapter contaminated reads, their consequences in assembly, and present HiFiAdapterFilt, a simple and memory efficient solution for removing adapter contaminated reads prior to assembly.
Keywords: Adapter; Circular consensus sequencing; PacBio HiFi; Sequence data filtering.
© 2022. The Author(s).