Perfecting bacterial genome assembly

DNA sequencers cannot directly provide an organism's complete genome sequence. Rather, they produce fragmented and error-containing pieces of the genome (reads), and the computational task of reconstructing a genome from sequencing reads is known as assembly. In this thesis, I investigate the best practices for assembling bacterial genomes and develop new algorithms which address shortcomings of existing methods. Using these new developments, it is possible to produce bacterial genome sequences with greater accuracy than ever before, often reaching perfection: zero-error genomes.