WebQUAST: online evaluation of genome assemblies

Abstract

Selecting proper genome assembly is key for downstream analysis in genomics studies. However, the availability of many genome assembly tools and the huge variety of their running parameters challenge this task. The existing online evaluation tools are limited to specific taxa or provide just a one-sided view on the assembly quality. We present WebQUAST, a web server for multifaceted quality assessment and comparison of genome assemblies based on the state-of-the-art QUAST tool. The server is freely available at https://www.ccb.uni-saarland.de/quast/. WebQUAST can handle an unlimited number of genome assemblies and evaluate them against a user-provided or pre-loaded reference genome or in a completely reference-free fashion. We demonstrate key WebQUAST features in three common evaluation scenarios: assembly of an unknown species, a model organism, and a close variant of it.