All benchmarking was conducted on a Intel® Core™ i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz on a machine running Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS.

The following Tables show the summary statistics of plassembler (with Flye and Raven) and Unicycler run from read sets simulated from 20 assemblies from Wick, Judd, Wyres et al 2021 here, Houtak et al (C222), here and here, Mathers et al (CAV1217) here, and for De Maio et al here.

Accuracy was assessed using QUAST comparing plasmid assemblies against the ground truth.

You can find the full pipeline used to generate these results here and the results themselves here.

Time and Memory Usage

As can be seen below, Plassembler was consistently faster than Unicycler by 3-10x in terms of wall clock time, with the largest increase coming single-threaded. Plassembler with Raven was also faster than with Flye.

Threads	Program	Median Wall Clock Time (s)	Min Wall Clock Time (s)	Max Wall Clock Time (s)	Median Max Memory (MB)	Min Max Memory (MB)	Max Max Memory (MB)
1	Plassembler with Flye	7012	1926	28103	3039	2442	5275
1	Plassembler with Raven	3893	815	22106	1764	1307	2464
1	Unicycler	32619	13183	66880	2804	1404	3784
8	Plassembler with Flye	1563	531	4852	4842	2274	7712
8	Plassembler with Raven	700	132	3051	2579	1587	7891
8	Unicycler	4411	2139	10003	6568	5610	6826
16	Plassembler with Flye	1019	497	2675	5892	3832	15086
16	Plassembler with Raven	430	114	1749	3517	2360	15195
16	Unicycler	2554	1347	5098	12967	6509	13549

Assembly Accuracy

All results below were taken from each program run with 8 threads.

As can be seen below, plassembler missed only 1 plasmid (2370 bp plasmid in Enterobacter kobei MSB1 1B) while Unicycler missed 7, of which were small (under 10kbp). These were S. aureus C222 (2473 bp), C. koseri MINF 9D (9294 bp), K. oxytoca MSB1 2C (4574 bp), K. variicola INF345 (5783 bp), E. cloacae RBHSTW-00059 (2495 bp) and K. pneumoniae RBHSTW-00128 (3980 bp).

plassembler also had more fragmented assemblies than Unicycler (3 and 5 v 1). All assemblers fragmented the linear plasmid in K. variicola_ INF345, while Plassembler with Flye also fragmented a 3764 bp plasmid in C. gillenii RBHSTW-00142, and a 4841 bp plasmid in K. oxytoca RBHSTW-00167.

Brackets indicate (minimum and maximum). Indels and Mismatches are expressed as median, and per 100 kbp from QUAST.

Program	Missed Plasmids	Incomplete/Fragmented Plasmids	Misassemblies	Genome Fraction	Indels	Mismatches
Plassembler with Flye	1	3	0	99.78 (mean), 99.97 (median), (98.16, 100)	0 (0, 1.37)	0.91 (0, 11.12)
Plassembler with Raven	1	5	0	99.04 (mean), 99.96 (median), (87.86, 100)	0 (0, 1.37)	1.04 (0, 11.12)
Unicycler	7	1	1	93.81 (mean), 99.88 (median), (0, 100)	0 (0, 1.54)	0.88 (0, 7.28)