Thank you, for your help to all, I will try the soap after making Kmer estimation. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm on a lab server, I think it should be ok for the RAM.
@h.mon I already done an assembly for another sample for the same specie and I got a coverage about 10X and I checked the quality by looking for BUSCO (highly conserved genes among arthropoda) gene and I got aroun 80% of them but only 40% where complet. This genome is full of repeat element.
How did you reduce the number of reads? Did you just down-sampled, or you performed digital normalization? And did you get an assembly or not? I will be honest with you, with a 1.5Gb genome and only paired-end Illumina sequencing, you won't get a good assembly anyway, no matter what you do.
You have been having problems with your assembly for some time, so lets take a step back and check for some potential problems:
1) How is the quality of you sequencing?
2) Are you trimming adapters?
3) What is the expected coverage?
4) Did you check for contaminants (bacterial / human /whatever other species) on your reads?
I would add to this: have you checked the overall kmer abundance distribution, to see whether the sample is heterozygous, coverage is as expected, etc? Jellyfish + GenomeScope are useful here. Similarly preQC worked well for us in identifying problematic assemblies, which can do a bit of the above but compares your results to other known assemblies of varying complexity.
But I completely agree w/ h.mon, a 1.3Gb genome requires much more than simply paired-end data. You need contextual information to work around repetitive regions or problematic areas (high quality mate-pairs, long reads, 10x, HiC, etc). Every large-scale assembly (and the strategy used) is different, but your original paired-end can at least give you some hints as to how complex it may get and maybe the best options to improve it.
In case you appreciate a more pragmatic outlook on the expected results, compare the genome assemblies of the Chinese Hamster Ovary cell lines ~2.5 Gbp genome:
The >100k contig assembly used many different library sizes and was nevertheless difficult to work with.