Polypolish v0.7.1 is out! github.com/rrwick/Polyp... Main new feature is better handling of read name suffixes, which makes it easier to use Polypolish with aligners other than BWA-MEM. I've been using it with minibwa, which seems pretty great: github.com/lh3/minibwa
Ryan Wick
Ryan Wick
@rrwick.bsky.social
Bioinformatician at the Centre for Pathogen Genomics at the University of Melbourne
1.2K followers127 following95 posts
New blog post! I reran the Autocycler paper benchmarks on some new tools/versions/pipelines: rrwick.github.io/2026/07/24/b... (1/3)
Notable finding #1: the current version of metaMDBG is quite good! Fast, very memory efficient and now one of the most accurate assemblers. Nice work, @gaetanbenoit.bsky.social! github.com/GaetanBenoit... (2/3)
Notable finding #2: The new autocycler_fast.sh pipeline did just as well as its bigger/slower sibling. If you've been avoiding Autocycler because of the computational time, this might be worth a look: github.com/rrwick/Autoc... (3/3)
In some recent blog posts, I had a Klebsiella genome with a mysteriously higher ONT error rate. But Michael Biggel (University of Zurich) emailed me with the likely explanation: 7-deazaguanine mods. Thanks, Michael! Here's his preprint about this: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
I also put a small update on my blog post explaining this: rrwick.github.io/2026/06/19/d...
Follow-up to my last two blog posts: I now look at methylation calling with Dorado v2 and the new hac@v6.0.0 model from @nanoporetech.com. rrwick.github.io/2026/07/08/d...
Follow-up to my last blog post: I now look at assembly polishing with Dorado v2 and the new hac@v6.0.0 model from @nanoporetech.com. rrwick.github.io/2026/06/19/d...
New blog post! I analyse the new hac@v6.0.0 basecalling model from @nanoporetech.com and discuss the conspicuous lack of a new sup model: rrwick.github.io/2026/06/11/d...
Ryan Wick reposted
🎉 Excited to share that our paper, “agtools: A Software Framework to Manipulate Assembly Graphs”, has been accepted in Bioinformatics Advances. (1/n) 🔗 GitHub: github.com/Vini2/agtools 📄 Paper: academic.oup.com/bioinformati... #bioinformatics #genomics #openscience
Ryan Wick reposted
Excited to finally share our new preprint on bioRxiv describing Verticall (github.com/rrwick/Verti...), a robust & efficient tool for building recombination-free bacterial phylogenies. Huge thanks to @rrwick.bsky.social & @katholt.bsky.social for this incredible work! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Ryan Wick reposted
Until joining @loolibear.bsky.social's lab in July, I embarrassingly hadn't had much experience with plasmids. So when I started, Leah said "here you go, have a look at this dataset". What a fun ride this has been. Preprint out today and thread below www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
New blog post: ONT read QC strategies for assembly rrwick.github.io/2026/02/05/r... Mini-study comparing a few QC/subsampling approaches, plus practical notes from my experience.
Ryan Wick reposted
Our new paper on Insertion Sequences (IS) in #Klebsiella - Lineages have vastly different IS loads and profiles - An inverse relationship between IS load and metabolic capacity, in particular phosphorus use, consistent with early reductive evolution. www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
Ryan Wick reposted
Phold's manuscript is now available @narjournal.bsky.social thanks to @susiegriggo.bsky.social @npbhavya.bsky.social @vijinim.bsky.social @linsalrob.bsky.social @martinsteinegger.bsky.social @milot.bsky.social @eunbelivable.bsky.social & others not on bsky #phagesky academic.oup.com/nar/article/...
Stoked to finally have a preprint out for Phold, our tool that uses protein structural information to enhance phage genome annotation #phagesky 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
New blog post with some thoughts on @nanoporetech.com and their recent announcement that the P2 Solo will be discontinued: rrwick.github.io/2026/01/21/p...
Just updated this old blog post: rrwick.github.io/2023/04/19/v... Now uses qsv instead of xsv, plus some other miscellaneous tweaks/fixes. In the 2+ years since I wrote this post, I use my tv function a LOT.
Happy to share that the paper describing Autocycler is now 100% up: doi.org/10.1093/bioi... (1/3)
And since both metaMDBG and Myloasm had new versions after the paper was accepted, here's a blog post with an updated benchmark: rrwick.github.io/2025/09/23/a... (3/3)
New blog post! metaMDBG (@gaetanbenoit.bsky.social) and Myloasm (@jimshaw.bsky.social) have had recent releases, so I updated the benchmarks from the Autocycler paper: rrwick.github.io/2025/09/23/a... Both tools improved considerably! Time to update your conda environments 😄
Ryan Wick reposted
Excited to share our latest preprint on agtools, an open-source Python framework for analysing and manipulating assembly graphs. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #Bioinformatics #genomics #assembly #assemblygraphs #software
Ryan Wick reposted
Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N
High-resolution metagenome assembly for modern long reads with myloasm https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.05.674543v1
New blog post! I added a new feature to @gbouras13.bsky.social's Pypolca: homopolymer-only polishing. Potentially useful for cross-sample polishing - early test on Cryptosporidium looks promising. Check it out here: rrwick.github.io/2025/09/04/h...
Ryan Wick reposted
Pleased to say that our preprint benchmarking Nanopore data for MLST, cgMLST, cgSNP & AMR typing from bacterial isolates is out! TL;DR you can get almost perfect results from 50x depth using live SUP basecalling with a GPU in under 20 hours #microsky#IDsky 🦠🧬🖥️ /1 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
Minor new release of @nanoporetech.com's Dorado: github.com/nanoporetech... It supports using --bacteria when polishing an assembly with v5.2.0 data, which is nice! But if I understand correctly, it's the same bacterial polishing model from Sep 2024, not a new model.
However, I hear rumours that ONT might be working on a new move-table-aware bacterial polishing model. See my blog post from Feb for details: rrwick.github.io/2025/02/07/d.... If true, I'll be eager to test it out when released.
Even though it's designed for metagenomes, I suspect it might work nicely on bacterial isolates as well, especially if you filter out low-depth contigs. This is what I've found for metaMDBG, a long-read metagenome assembler from @gaetanbenoit.bsky.social.
Ryan Wick reposted
Announcing myloasm, a new long-read (ONT R10/PacBio) metagenome assembler that I've been working on during my postdoc in the Heng Li lab (@lh3lh3.bsky.social). myloasm-docs.github.io
New blog post! In it, I benchmark the new version of Dorado from @nanoporetech.com, which comes with new DNA basecalling models. Short version: big accuracy gains for hac, small improvements for sup. Check it out for the full results: rrwick.github.io/2025/05/27/d...
New version of Dorado is out: github.com/nanoporetech... And for the first time in a year, this includes new DNA basecalling models! I'll try out these new models (v5.2.0) and compare them to the previous ones (v5.0.0) in a blog post in the near future.
New preprint! Autocycler is a tool for long-read consensus assembly of bacterial genomes. It's like Trycycler but can be run fully automated (without any human intervention). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/6)
Speaking of small plasmids, shout out to Plassembler by @gbouras13.bsky.social! It's the only tool I know of that can reliably assemble small plasmids from long-read data, and I use it with Autocycler to improve small plasmid recovery. github.com/gbouras13/pl... (5/6)
New preprint! Autocycler is a tool for long-read consensus assembly of bacterial genomes. It's like Trycycler but can be run fully automated (without any human intervention). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/6)
New preprint! Autocycler is a tool for long-read consensus assembly of bacterial genomes. It's like Trycycler but can be run fully automated (without any human intervention). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/6)
If you're interested in using Autocycler, the docs are probably more useful than the preprint: github.com/rrwick/Autoc... But if you want to see how it compares to other assemblers/pipelines, the preprint has a benchmark. (2/6)
Ryan Wick reposted
Delighted to see this paper from danderson123.bsky.social 's PhD out. We have been building tools for AMR gene detection for over a decade now, but multicopy genes remain challenging. Dan shows that with a gene-space de Bruijn graph and long reads, you can do well www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Do you (like me) create a bunch of conda environments, then later forget what they're for, when they were last updated, or which tools are in them? If so, you might this little project: github.com/rrwick/conda...