MeCorS: Metagenome-enabled error correction of single cell sequencing reads

Summary: We present a new tool, MeCorS, to correct chimeric reads and sequencing errors in Illumina data generated from single amplified genomes (SAGs). It uses sequence information derived from accompanying metagenome sequencing to accurately correct errors in SAG reads, even from ultra-low coverage regions. In evaluations on real data, we show that MeCorS outperforms BayesHammer, the most widely used state-of-the-art approach. MeCorS performs particularly well in correcting chimeric reads, which greatly improves both accuracy and contiguity of de novo SAG assemblies. Availability and implementation: https://github.com/metagenomics/MeCorS Contact: abremges@cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.