Finishing a complete giraffe genome from telomere to telomere with Verkko-Fillet.

Verkko-Fillet enables the production of a complete giraffe genome from telomere to telomere, increasing assembly quality from Q61.5 to Q73.6.

• Why it matters: High-quality, gapless genomes are essential for detailed biological studies, but current methods struggle with repetitive regions and structural errors, limiting their accuracy and completeness.
• What they did: The team developed Verkko-Fillet, an interactive Python framework that integrates multiple data sources to visualize, inspect, and refine genome assembly graphs, applied to both giraffe and human genomes.
• The result: This approach significantly improves genome contiguity and accuracy, demonstrating the importance of graph-based curation for generating finished, gapless genomes suitable for advanced analyses.