We are pleased to release PRICE (Paired-Read Iterative Contig Extension), a de novo genome assembler implemented in C++. Its name describes the strategy that it implements for genome assembly: PRICE uses paired-read information to iteratively increase the size of pre-assembled contigs. It was designed to address the challenge of assembling viral genomes that constituted a small minority of the reads within ultra-deep, short-read, metagenomic, shotgun datasets. PRICE has already enabled the discovery of several novel virus genomes from such complex datasets, and it is also being applied to the de novo assembly of large individual genomes. It is provided here as a beta release, pre-publication.
Download PRICE (beta)