benchNGS : An approach to benchmark short reads alignment tools

In the last decade a number of algorithms and associated software have been developed to align next generation sequencing (NGS) reads with relevant reference genomes. The accuracy of these programs may vary significantly, especially when the NGS reads are quite different from the available reference genome. We propose a benchmark to assess accuracy of short reads mapping based on the pre-computed global alignment of related genome sequences. In this paper we propose a benchmark to assess accuracy of the short reads mapping based on the pre-computed global alignment of closely related genome sequences. We outline the method and also present a short report of an experiment performed on five popular alignment tools based on the pairwise alignments of Escherichia coli O6 CFT073 genome with genomes of seven other bacteria.