Abstract

Genomics has revolutionized biological research, but quality assessment of the resulting assembled sequences is complicated and remains mostly limited to technical measures like N50.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.Software implemented in Python and datasets available for download from http://busco.ezlab.org.evgeny.zdobnov@unige.chSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.