A new DNA sequence assembly program

We describe the Genome Assembly Program (GAP), a new program for DNA sequence assembly. The program is suitable for large and small projects, a variety of strategies and can handle data from a range of sequencing instruments. It retains the useful components of our previous work, but includes many novel ideas and methods. Many of these methods have been made possible by the program's completely new, and highly interactive, graphical user interface. The program provides many visual clues to the current state of a sequencing project and allows users to interact in intuitive and graphical ways with their data. The program has tools to display and manipulate the various types of data that help to solve and check difficult assemblies, particularly those in repetitive genomes. We have introduced the following new displays: the Contig Selector, the Contig Comparator, the Template Display, the Restriction Enzyme Map and the Stop Codon Map. We have also made it possible to have any number of Contig Editors and Contig Joining Editors running simultaneously even on the same contig. The program also includes a new 'Directed Assembly' algorithm and routines for automatically detecting unfinished segments of sequence, to which it suggests experimental solutions.