Pushing the limits of de novo genome assembly for complex prokaryotic genomes harboring very long, near identical repeats

Generating a complete, de novo genome assembly for prokaryotes is often considered a solved problem. However, we here show that Pseudomonas koreensis P19E3 harbors multiple, near identical repeat pairs up to 70 kilobase pairs in length, which contained several genes that may confer fitness advantages to the strain. Its complex genome, which also included a variable shufflon region, could not be de novo assembled with long reads produced by Pacific Biosciences' technology, but required very long reads from Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Importantly, a repeat analysis, whose results we release for over 9600 prokaryotes, indicated that very complex bacterial genomes represent a general phenomenon beyond Pseudomonas. Roughly 10% of 9331 complete bacterial and a handful of 293 complete archaeal genomes represented this 'dark matter' for de novo genome assembly of prokaryotes. Several of these 'dark matter' genome assemblies contained repeats far beyond the resolution of the sequencing technology employed and likely contain errors, other genomes were closed employing labor-intense steps like cosmid libraries, primer walking or optical mapping. Using very long sequencing reads in combination with assembly algorithms capable of resolving long, near identical repeats will bring most prokaryotic genomes within reach of fast and complete de novo genome assembly.