Enly: improving draft genomes through reads recycling

The reconstruction of the complete genome sequence of an organism is an important point for comparative, functional and evolutionary genomics. Nevertheless, overcoming the problems encountered while completing the sequence of an entire genome can still be demanding in terms of time and resources. We have developed Enly, a simple tool based on the iterative mapping of sequence reads at contig edges, capable to extend the genomic contigs deriving from high-throughput sequencing, especially those deriving by Newbler-like assemblies. Testing it on a set of de novo draft genomes led to the closure of up to 20% of the gaps originally present. Enly is cross-platform and most of the steps of its pipeline are parallelizable, making easy and fast to improve a draft genome resulting from a de novo assembly.