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Updated: Apr 11, 2026

Hybrid De Novo Genome Assembly for the Generation of Complete Genomes of Urinary Bacteria using Short- and Long-read Sequencing Technologies
Published on: August 20, 2021
BUSCO: assessing genome assembly and annotation completeness with single-copy orthologs
Felipe A Simão1, Robert M Waterhouse1, Panagiotis Ioannidis1
1Department of Genetic Medicine and Development, University of Geneva Medical School and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, rue Michel-Servet 1, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland.
Motivation:
Genomics has revolutionized biological research, but quality assessment of the resulting assembled sequences is complicated and remains mostly limited to technical measures like N50.
Results:
We propose a measure for quantitative assessment of genome assembly and annotation completeness based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content. We implemented the assessment procedure in open-source software, with sets of Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs, named BUSCO.
Availability And Implementation:
Software implemented in Python and datasets available for download from http://busco.ezlab.org.
Contact:
evgeny.zdobnov@unige.ch
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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