- Wade, Kristen;
- Suseno, Rayo;
- Kizer, Kerry;
- Williams, Jacqueline;
- Boquett, Juliano;
- Caillier, Stacy;
- Pollock, Nicholas;
- Renschen, Adam;
- Santaniello, Adam;
- Oksenberg, Jorge;
- Norman, Paul;
- Augusto, Danillo;
- Hollenbach, Jill
The extremely high levels of genetic polymorphism within the human major histocompatibility complex (MHC) limit the usefulness of reference-based alignment methods for sequence assembly. We incorporate a short-read, de novo assembly algorithm into a workflow for novel application to the MHC. MHConstructor is a containerized pipeline designed for high-throughput, haplotype-informed, reproducible assembly of both whole genome sequencing and target capture short-read data in large, population cohorts. To-date, no other self-contained tool exists for the generation of de novo MHC assemblies from short-read data. MHConstructor facilitates wide-spread access to high-quality, alignment-free MHC sequence analysis.