Whole-genome amplification (WGA) create specific chimeric fragments, which consist mainly of palindrome sequences. We developed the tool Pacasus to detect and correct these palindromic sequences in long reads, for example from PacBio and Nanopore.

Next-generation sequencing requires sufficient DNA to be available. If limited, whole-genome amplification is applied to generate additional amounts of DNA. Such amplification often results in many chimeric DNA fragments, in particular artificial palindromic sequences, which limit the usefulness long reads from technologies such as PacBio and Oxford Nanopore unusable for further analysis. We developed Pacasus, a tool for correcting such errors in long reads. With Pacasus long-read technologies become readily available for sequencing targets with very small amounts of DNA.