MOTIVATION:

Genomics has revolutionized biological research, but quality assessment of the resulting assembled sequences is complicated and remains mostly limited to technical measures like N50.

RESULTS:

We propose a measure for quantitative assessment of genome assembly and annotation completeness based on evolutionarily informed expectations of gene content. We implemented the assessment procedure in open-source software, with sets of Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs, named BUSCO.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION:

Software implemented in Python and datasets available for download from http://busco.ezlab.org.

CONTACT:

evgeny.zdobnov@unige.ch

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.