Week 1 Summary

This week, you’ve learned about BlobToolKit and how important it is for analysing genome assemblies. You have looked at the web viewer and learned how to find your organism of interest, and how to understand the basic BTK plot.

Remember, BlobToolKit is a toolkit for exploring GC/coverage and taxonomic annotations of sequences in a genome assembly. The web viewer allows you to explore existing public genome assemblies

BTK is described in this publication by Challis et al, 2020 which has been cited over 400 times by researchers who care about the presence of other organisms in their genome assemblies.

Reasons why you should use BlobToolKit

• To avoid making research claims about an organism when the DNA sequence data actually come from a different organism
• To clean your own genome assemblies before you submit them to public databases.
• BTK will not submit your genome assemblies to databases for you. It is just a tool for examining the assemblies.

Here is a great example where researchers used BlobToolKit to obtain high quality genome data from a contaminated sample: Aylward et al, 2021

Next week, you will be looking in detail at using the filters and settings in the web viewer in order to carry out more in depth analysis of public genome assemblies, and you will have a chance to try out the tool for yourself.

We look forward to learning with you further next week!