Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre congratulates Senior Scientist Dr. Inanc Birol and his team, winners of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics’ inaugural International Bioinformatics Resource Award for ABySS!
ABySS (Assembly By Short Sequences) was the first short read de novo assembler to be able to assemble mammalian-scale genomes from the approximately 100 “letter” strings generated by DNA sequencing machines. With thousands of downloads and more than 700 citations in the scientific literature, ABySS has quickly become one of the most popular genome assembly tools. The software has been used to assemble the genomes of several species from scratch, including the commercially important white spruce tree. However, its “assembly first” approach (rather than alignment to a reference genome first, followed by assembly) makes it particularly useful for the analysis of heavily rearranged cancer genomes. As such, ABySS is used in cancer genome projects at the GSC and beyond, including the BC Cancer Agency’s Personalized Oncogenomics project.
The ABySS team includes İnanç Birol, Steve Jones, Readman Chiu, Justin Chu, Shaun Jackman, Hamid Mohamadi, Ka Ming Nip, Jacquie Schein, Benjamin Vandervalk, & René Warren (current GSC staff) and Anthony Raymond, Jared Simpson, & Kim Wong (former GSC staff).
The ABySS software can be downloaded at here