DNA sequence data has become an indispensable tool for Molecular Biology & Evolutionary Biology. Study in these fields now require a genome sequence to work from. We call this a 'Reference Sequence.' We need to build a reference for each species. We do this by Genome Assembly. De novo Genome Assembly is the process of reconstructing the original DNA sequence from the fragment reads alone.

Questions of the tutorial:

• What are the factors that affect genome assembly?
• How does Genome assembly work?

Objectives of the tutorial:

• Perform an optimised Velvet assembly with the Velvet Optimiser
• Compare this assembly with those we did in the basic tutorial
• Perform an assembly using the SPAdes assembler.