Introducing BlobToolKit

The BlobToolKit project has been funded by the BBSRC for 3 years to develop the latest iteration of the Blobology/Blobtools genome assembly QC, visualisation and filtering tools. The project is a collaboration between the research groups of Mark Blaxter at the University of Edinburgh and Guy Cochrane at EMBL-EBI to develop software tools and protocols to aid in the separation of cobionts and removal of contaminants from genomic datasets prior to genome sequence assembly.

BlobToolKit follows on from the development of Blobology1 and BlobTools2 over the past few years in the Blaxter Lab at the University of Edinburgh. As development on BlobToolKit has only just begun, users interested in applying these approaches should continue to use Dom Laetsch’s BlobTools package directly until the methods are fully incorporated into BlobToolKit.

1 Kumar et al. 2013. Blobology: exploring raw genome data for contaminants, symbionts and parasites using taxon-annotated GC-coverage plots. Frontiers in Genetics, 4:237
2 GitHub – DRL/blobtools: Application for the visualisation of draft genome assemblies and general QC (available at https://github.com/DRL/blobtools).

Update [2017-08-01]:
The BlobTools Manuscript is now available on F1000 research
Laetsch & Blaxter 2017. BlobTools: Interrogation of genome assemblies [version 1; referees: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research, 6:1287 (doi: 10.12688/f1000research.12232.1)