NanoSpring: reference-free lossless compression of nanopore sequencing reads using an approximate assembly approach [article]

Qingxi Meng, Shubham Chandak, Yifan Zhu, Tsachy Weissman
2021 bioRxiv   pre-print
Motivation: The amount of data produced by genome sequencing experiments has been growing rapidly over the past several years, making compression important for efficient storage, transfer and analysis of the data. In recent years, nanopore sequencing technologies have seen increasing adoption since they are portable, real-time and provide long reads. However, there has been limited progress on compression of nanopore sequencing reads obtained in FASTQ files. Previous work ENANO focuses mostly
more » ... quality score compression and does not achieve significant gains for the compression of read sequences over general-purpose compressors. RENANO achieves significantly better compression for read sequences but is limited to aligned data with a reference available. Results: We present NanoSpring, a reference-free compressor for nanopore sequencing reads, relying on an approximate assembly approach. We evaluate NanoSpring on a variety of datasets including bacterial, metagenomic, plant, animal, and human whole genome data. For recently basecalled high quality nanopore datasets, NanoSpring achieves close to 3x improvement in compression over state-of-the-art reference-free compressors. The computational requirements of NanoSpring are practical, although it uses more time and memory during compression than previous tools to achieve the compression gains. Availability: NanoSpring is available on GitHub at https://github.com/qm2/NanoSpring.
doi:10.1101/2021.06.09.447198 fatcat:cev6iepz3bbsve3k5b3pqa7cc4