Meracoulous assembler: has someone used it?

[illinu]

Hi everyone,
At the Assemblathon II competition there was an assembler reported as one which ranked higher about 10 times. It's called Meraculous but the authors failed to provide their program instructions to the Assemblathon paper (others did which helps getting the assembler working for the first time).

In reading the Manual from Meraculous they say:
We expect the user to convert data as needed into the following format, where line matches the following perl regex:
\d+:\d+:\d+:\d+:\d+\/[12]:\S+:\S+

I guess they refer to the header of each read in the fastq file?

I don't understand why they need to make it so complicated and there seem to be no support page or google group.

Has someone used this tool? Can someone give me a quick hint to modify the header of my reads:
@HWI-M00991:47:000000000-A5JA9:1:1101:10000:10212 1:N:0:CTTGTA

Thank you in advance

[Brian Bushnell]

I know the authors of Meraculous, so I'll notify them.

[GeneGolts]

Hi, we're currently working on releasing a much updated version of Meraculous. What the Assemblathon-II paper refers to is way too old to support at this point, and the new version deals with the read headers a lot more robustly. You won't need to modify the header in your example. The software hasn't been made available to the general public yet, so please contact me directly and we'll discuss how to best get it out to you.

Best,

Eugene Goltsman
[email protected]

[illinu]

Hi, we're currently working on releasing a much updated version of Meraculous. What the Assemblathon-II paper refers to is way too old to support at this point, and the new version deals with the read headers a lot more robustly. You won't need to modify the header in your example. The software hasn't been made available to the general public yet, so please contact me directly and we'll discuss how to best get it out to you.

Best,

Eugene Goltsman
[email protected]

Eugene Goltsman,
That's very kind of you.

Thanks