HaVec: An Efficient de Bruijn Graph Construction Algorithm for Genome Assembly

Background. The rapid advancement of sequencing technologies has made it possible to regularly produce millions of high-quality reads from the DNA samples in the sequencing laboratories. To this end, the de Bruijn graph is a popular data structure in the genome assembly literature for efficient representation and processing of data. Due to the number of nodes in a de Bruijn graph, the main barrier here is the memory and runtime. Therefore, this area has received significant attention in contemporary literature. Results. In this paper, we present an approach called HaVec that attempts to achieve a balance between the memory consumption and the running time. HaVec uses a hash table along with an auxiliary vector data structure to store the de Bruijn graph thereby improving the total memory usage and the running time. A critical and noteworthy feature of HaVec is that it exhibits no false positive error. Conclusions. In general, the graph construction procedure takes the major share of the time involved in an assembly process. HaVec can be seen as a significant advancement in this aspect. We anticipate that HaVec will be extremely useful in the de Bruijn graph-based genome assembly.