I think there's been a while since the last version of oases came out. I was wondering what is the opinion of the people that routinely work on the novo transcriptomes assemblies in terms of quality, computational resources (RAM), documentation, etc.
But for quality of the assembly I only have the results from the Oases papers (which favors oases).
There is somebody who have tried the range of k-mer with trinity to make a fair comparison?
As you say, there have not been many updates lately to Velvet/Oases, but there have been for Trinity. I have personally noticed better results with Trinity. Genes that were only partially assembled with Oases were fully assembled with Trinity.
This paper looks at particular genes for full-length reconstructions for phylogeny, and analyzes for chimeras. Oases doesn't perform so well.
"Optimizing de novo assembly of short-read RNA-seq data for phylogenomics."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23672450
My personal experience (multiple plant and arthropod species with >150 million reads) is that Trinity performance is superior to Oases multi-k assemblies, in particular when judged based on highly accurate (>99% identity) assembly of known transcripts.
Trinity in-silico normalization is also indispensable for large data sets.
The active maintenance of the Trinity package is also a huge plus.