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Is there a standard file format for anchored contigs?

Hi,

Given a genome with many unordered contigs, and some external information that can be used to anchor these to chromosomes/linkage groups, is there a standard file format for specifying the linkage relationships between contigs? Downstream analyses will rely on this order, for example, window-based calculations of popgen summary statistics. For example, I can map the set of linkage markers to the reference using a short-read aligner, and determine that a certain set of contigs belong to linkage group X, and are in a particular order. Should this simply be represented in a fasta file with linkage information encoded in the header?

Thanks!

genome assembly linkage map anchor contigs contigs

One commonly used method is to link contigs into scaffolds by an arbitrary number of Ns - for example, 10 Ns: ACGTNNNNNNNNNNACGT.

2 answers

ALLMAPS: robust scaffold ordering based on multiple maps (github: ALLMAPS) project documentation includes ALLMAPS: How to use different types of genomic maps which does a good job of outlining the various formats that are be found in the wild and provides tools for inter-conversion and many other useful functions.

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