Summary: MEGAHIT is a NGS de novo assembler for assembling large and complex metagenomics data in a time- and cost-efficient manner. It finished assembling a soil metagenomics dataset with 252 Gbps in 44.1 and 99.6 h on a single computing node with and without a graphics processing unit, respectively. MEGAHIT assembles the data as a whole, i.e. no pre-processing like partitioning and normalization was needed. When compared with previous methods on assembling the soil data, MEGAHIT generated a three-time larger assembly, with longer contig N50 and average contig length; furthermore, 55.8% of the reads were aligned to the assembly, giving a fourfold improvement.

Availability and implementation: The source code of MEGAHIT is freely available at https://github.com/voutcn/megahit under GPLv3 license.

Contact:  rb@l3-bioinfo.com or twlam@cs.hku.hk

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.