De novo transcriptome assembly with ABySS

Motivation: Whole transcriptome shotgun sequencing data from non-normalized samples offer unique opportunities to study the metabolic states of organisms. One can deduce gene expression levels using sequence coverage as a surrogate, identify coding changes or discover novel isoforms or transcripts. Especially for discovery of novel events, de novo assembly of transcriptomes is desirable. Results: Transcriptome from tumor tissue of a patient with follicular lymphoma was sequenced with 36 base pair (bp) single-and paired-end reads on the Illumina Genome Analyzer II platform. We assembled similar to 194 million reads using ABySS into 66 921 contigs 100 bp or longer, with a maximum contig length of 10 951 bp, representing over 30 million base pairs of unique transcriptome sequence, or roughly 1% of the genome.