Webinar: Variant calling and de novo genome assembly with PacBio HiFi reads

In this webinar, Sarah Kingan, Staff Scientist, PacBio, presents recent work on de novo genome assembly using PacBio HiFi reads. She highlights the benefits of HiFi data for base level accuracy, haplotype phasing, and ease of computation. And in samples ranging from human to plants, she benchmarks various tools for HiFi assembly and phasing, including the newly extended FALCON-Unzip assembler. Subsequently, Andrew Carroll, Genomics Product Lead, GoogleAI, explores how the GoogleAI team retrained DeepVariant, a highly accurate SNP and Indel caller, for PacBio HiFi data. The resulting DeepVariant models achieve comparable accuracies to short-read methods with the additional benefit of expanding accurate analyses into harder regions of the genome. He also explores how PacBio HiFi data can improve the Genome in a Bottle benchmark sets.