Tool:NCBI's Foreign Contamination Screen (FCS) tool improves the quality of GenBank submissions

Question

[PeterC_NCBI]

The Foreign Contamination Screen (FCS) tool is a quality assurance process for GenBank submissions that you can run yourself. FCS offers enhanced contaminant detection sensitivity to improve your genome assemblies and facilitate high-quality data submissions to GenBank. We recently made several improvements to make the tool even easier to use. See our post on NCBI Insights for more details.

FCS is available from GitHub at https://github.com/ncbi/fcs/

Answer 1

[Mensur Dlakic]

I give you guys credit for sharing the tool, as it is always nice to have an option for local runs. Still, a 512 Gb RAM requirement will severely limit the number of people who can actually use it. I suggest you try to make the database as non-redundant as possible, or come up with a non-alignment comparison method that doesn't take up so much memory.

[PeterC_NCBI]

Thank you for the feedback. I'll pass it along to the team. Yes, it does require a lot or RAM. One option of course would be to run it on the cloud where you can access as much RAM as you want without having to invest in hardware.