Pipho, K.; Wray, G. A.

The PacBio Revio simplifies genome assembly by generating very long reads with very few errors at an affordable price point. Comparative ease of assembly is democratizing access, leading to a larger niche for assembly workflows. HiFi-Helper is a user-friendly snakemake workflow designed to facilitate genome assembly from HiFi data alone. This tool produces a visual summary that provides intuitive feedback on the quality of the resulting assembly and guides assembly parameter optimization. The case studies presented here confirm that HiFi-only assemblies produced by HiFi-helper can meet or exceed the quality of genomes assembled in prior decades with a much lower investment of time and resources.