Bioinformatics

Bandage: interactive visualisation of de novo genome assemblies

Wick, R. R., Schultz, M. B., Zobel, J., Holt, K. E..

Summary: While de novo assembly graphs contain assembled contigs (nodes), the connections between those contigs (edges) are difficult for users to access. Bandage (a Bioinformatics Application for Navigating De novo Assembly Graphs Easily) is a tool for visualising assembly graphs with connections. Users can zoom in to specific areas of the graph and interact with it by moving nodes, adding labels, changing colours and extracting sequences. BLAST searches can be performed within the Bandage GUI and the hits are displayed as highlights in the graph. By displaying connections between contigs, Bandage presents new possibilities for analysing de novo assemblies that are not possible through investigation of contigs alone.

Availability and implementation: Source code and binaries are freely available at https://github.com/rrwick/Bandage. Bandage is implemented in C++ and supported on Linux, OS X and Windows.

Contact: rrwick@gmail.com

Supplementary Information:A full feature list and screenshots are available at Bioinformatics online and http://rrwick.github.io/Bandage.