High-Quality Mitogenome Assembly and Standardization with mtGrasp
news ·High-quality, accessible mitogenome sequences are essential for comparative genomics, phylogenetics, and environmental DNA (eDNA) applications. While genomic sequencing reads are available for diverse species, mitochondrial sequences within these datasets remain largely untapped due to the lack of specialized tools for assembling mitogenomes from short-read libraries.
Our latest publication in Methods in Ecology and Evolution introduces mtGrasp, a streamlined, memory-efficient pipeline for assembling complete and standardized mitogenomes from short-read metazoan DNA libraries.
In Lopez et al. (2025), we assembled 23 short-read libraries and found that mtGrasp ran 2–7 times faster and used 3–4 times less memory compared to existing tools like GetOrganelle and MitoZ. Additionally, mtGrasp successfully assembled mitogenomes of varying completeness across diverse animal taxa. Standardizing mitogenome annotations with mtGrasp improves the accuracy of downstream phylogenetic analysis and enables the design of robust qPCR-based eDNA assays using mitogenomes assembled from museum voucher specimens.
We expect mtGrasp to advance the development of high-quality eDNA tools and facilitate comparative genomic analyses.