Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 8, 2025

Heuristic Mining of Hierarchical Genotypes and Accessory Genome Loci in Bacterial Populations
Published on: December 7, 2021
AGC: compact representation of assembled genomes with fast queries and updates
Sebastian Deorowicz1, Agnieszka Danek1, Heng Li2,3
1Department of Algorithmics and Software, Faculty of Automatic Control, Electronics and Computer Science, Silesian University of Technology, Akademicka 16, Gliwice 44-100, Poland.
Motivation:
High-quality sequence assembly is the ultimate representation of complete genetic information of an individual. Several ongoing pangenome projects are producing collections of high-quality assemblies of various species. Each project has already generated assemblies of hundreds of gigabytes on disk, greatly impeding the distribution of and access to such rich datasets.
Results:
Here, we show how to reduce the size of the sequenced genomes by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Our tool compresses the genomes significantly better than the existing programs and is much faster. Moreover, its unique feature is the ability to access any contig (or its part) in a fraction of a second and easily append new samples to the compressed collections. Thanks to this, AGC could be useful not only for backup or transfer purposes but also for routine analysis of pangenome sequences in common pipelines. With the rapidly reduced cost and improved accuracy of sequencing technologies, we anticipate more comprehensive pangenome projects with much larger sample sizes. AGC is likely to become a foundation tool to store, distribute and access pangenome data.
Availability And Implementation:
The source code of AGC is available at https://github.com/refresh-bio/agc. The package can be installed via Bioconda at https://anaconda.org/bioconda/agc.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
More Related Videos
12:08Hybrid 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
10:41Leveraging CyVerse Resources for De Novo Comparative Transcriptomics of Underserved Non-model Organisms
Published on: May 9, 2017
Related Concept Videos
Genome Annotation and Assembly
Gene Evolution - Fast or Slow?
In contrast, regions which code...
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Genomics
Maxam-Gilbert Sequencing
Challenges of the Maxam-Gilbert Method
The...
Genomic DNA in Eukaryotes