Systematic benchmarks reveal DNA polymerase combinations for high-quality genome assembly

Polymerase choice for PacBio HiFi long-range amplification strongly affects genome assembly contiguity and gene completeness, with five enzymes yielding >1 Mb contig N50 and >90% gene completeness.

• Why it matters: Biodiversity genomics often relies on ethanol-preserved specimens, minimally invasive biopsies, and small-bodied organisms that lack flash-frozen tissue, yet assembly quality depends on amplification performance.
• What they did: The study benchmarks eleven long-range DNA polymerases for PacBio HiFi assembly across a springtail, a sea slug, and a bat, attributing differences to GC-dependent amplification bias and read coverage heterogeneity.
• The result: Combining reads from different polymerases frequently improves assemblies and enables haplotype-resolved assemblies for a ~1 Gb giant springtail and ~2 Gb bat, improved the sea slug reference, and boosts variant-calling accuracy on the human GIAB benchmark.

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