HiTEC: accurate error correction in high-throughput sequencing data

Abstract

High-throughput sequencing technologies produce very large amounts of data and sequencing errors constitute one of the major problems in analyzing such data. Current algorithms for correcting these errors are not very accurate and do not automatically adapt to the given data. We present HiTEC, an algorithm that provides a highly accurate, robust and fully automated method to correct reads produced by high-throughput sequencing methods. Our approach provides significantly higher accuracy than previous methods. It is time and space efficient and works very well for all read lengths, genome sizes and coverage levels. The source code of HiTEC is freely available at www.csd.uwo.ca/~ilie/HiTEC/.