Figure 1. Comparison of Assemblies of Illumina Data with and without Quality Control.

Contig length histograms illustrate the number of contigs within a certain size fraction for assemblies of Illumina reads with quality filtering (red) and without quality filtering (purple). Contig lengths were compared for assemblies of different community complexities (10 genomes, 100 genomes, 400 genomes). Only contigs greater than 500 bp are shown, the x-axis is log scale. There was a strong improvement in the assemblies with pre-assembly quality control of the reads.