Figure 6. Approaches to handling of spliced reads.

(a) In de novo transcriptome assembly, splice-crossing reads (red) are no different than any other reads, but will only contribute to a contig (solid green), when the reads are at high enough density to overlap by more than a set of user-defined assembly parameters. Parts of gene models (dotted green) or entire gene models (dotted magenta) can be missed if expressed at sub-threshold. (b) Splice crossing reads can be mapped directly onto the genome if the reads are long enough to make gapped-read mappers practical. (c) Alternatively, regular short read mappers can be used to map spliced reads ungapped onto supplied additional known or predicted splice junctions.