Data for: Benchmarking Oxford Nanopore read assemblers for high-quality molluscan genomes

Choosing the optimum assembly approach is essential to achieving a high-quality genome assembly suitable for comparative and evolutionary genomic investigations. Significant recent progress in long-read sequencing technologies such as PacBio and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) also brought about a large variety of assemblers. Although these have been extensively tested on model species such as Homo sapiens and Drosophila melanogaster, such benchmarking has not been done in Mollusca which lacks widely adopted model species. Molluscan genomes are notoriously rich in repeats and are often highly heterozygous, making their assembly challenging. Here, we benchmarked 10 assemblers based on ONT raw reads from two published molluscan genomes of differing properties, the gastropod Chrysomallon squamiferum (356.6Mb, 1.59% heterozygosity) and the bivalve Mytilus coruscus (1593Mb, 1.94% heterozygosity). By optimising the assembly pipeline, we greatly improved both genomes from previously publish...