Velvet assembler

Velvet is an algorithm package designed for de novo genome assembly and the alignment of short sequencing reads, developed by Daniel Zerbino and Ewan Birney and first released in 2008. It works by building and manipulating de Bruijn graphs from the short reads, then removing errors and simplifying regions of repeated sequence within those graphs to reconstruct a genome's sequence without relying on a pre-existing reference genome. Velvet is written in C for Unix-like operating systems, distributed under the GPL license, and its assembly methods have also been incorporated into commercial bioinformatics packages such as Sequencher, Geneious, MacVector and BioNumerics, reflecting its influence on subsequent de novo assembly tools.