Table 2. Statistics for the different approaches used to assemble the var transcripts.

Var assembly approaches were applied to malaria patient ex vivo samples (n=32) from Wichers et al., 2021, and statistics determined. Given are the total number of assembled var transcripts longer than 500 nt containing at least one significantly annotated var domain, the maximum length of the longest assembled var transcript in nucleotides and the N50 value, respectively. The N50 is defined as the sequence length of the shortest var contig, with all var contigs greater than or equal to this length together accounting for 50% of the total length of concatenated var transcript assemblies. Misassemblies represent the number of misassemblies for each approach.

	Number of contigs ≥500 nt	Maximum length (nt)	Average contig length (nt)	N50	Number of misassemblies
Original approach	6441	10,412	1621	2302	336
Domain approach	4691	5003	954	1088	NA*
Whole transcript approach	3011	12,586	2771	5381	2

^*Number of misassemblies were not determined for the domain approach due to its poor performance in other metrics.