Rapid and sensitive detection of genome contamination at scale with FCS-GX

Assembled genome sequences are being generated at an exponential rate. Here we present FCS-GX, part of NCBI's Foreign Contamination Screen (FCS) tool suite, optimized to identify and remove contaminant sequences in new genomes. FCS-GX screens most genomes in 0.1-10 min. Testing FCS-GX on artificially fragmented genomes demonstrates high sensitivity and specificity for diverse contaminant species. We used FCS-GX to screen 1.6 million GenBank assemblies and identified 36.8 Gbp of contamination, comprising 0.16% of total bases, with half from 161 assemblies. We updated assemblies in NCBI RefSeq to reduce detected contamination to 0.01% of bases. FCS-GX is available at https://github.com/ncbi/fcs/ or…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Agriculture
• DU
  Drexel University
• EB
  European Bioinformatics Institute
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• AR
  Agricultural Research Service
• UN
  U.S. National Library of Medicine