New SPAdes 3.6.1

Dear user,

We are happy to announce that we have just released SPAdes 3.6.1, which is a bug-fix release of version 3.6. Please consider updating SPAdes.

Your comments, bug reports, and suggestions are very welcomed. They will help us to further improve SPAdes. If you have any troubles running SPAdes, please provide us with the files params.txt and spades.log from the output directory. Address for communications: spades.support@bioinf.spbau.ru.

In addition, we wanted to let you know about the brand new Bioinformatics Specialization on Coursera that started on September 1. The Specialization features six courses and a capstone that will make you into an expert bioinformatician :) The Capstone for this Specialization, developed as a collaboration with scientists at Illumina, will feature various application challenges in Biological Big Data using the popular BaseSpace cloud platform at Illumina. Check out this video to hear Semyon Kruglyak, Senior Director of Informatics at Illumina, explain why he wants to interview you if you excel in this Specialization :) There is also a press release surrounding the start of the Specialization.

In particular, the Bioinformatics Specialization includes extensive coverage of algorithmic ideas behind modern assembly algorithms. In addition, it includes a Bioinformatics Application challenge focusing on practical applications of SPAdes and introducing you to BaseSpace, the Illumina cloud platform that features SPAdes.

We hope that this Specialization will help you to further develop your SPAdes skills so that you will continue using SPAdes as well as the dipSPAdes, truSPADes, metaSPAdes, rnaSPAdes, hybridSPAdes, and plasmidSPAdes tools that we have recently released or will be releasing in fall 2015.

The Specialization has two different learner tracks for each course in the Specialization:

- "Biologist Track" (Certificates of Completion): The biologist track is designed for students who are interested in learning about how computational methods are applied to biology but don't want to delve into programming. Instead of programming assignments, the biologist track will feature "Bioinformatics Application Challenges" helping you understand how to apply dozens of modern bioinformatics tools (like SPAdes) to experimental datasets, a critical skill of the modern biologist.
- "Hacker Track" (Certificates with Distinction): The hacker track is aimed at learners who know how to program and want to learn more about elegant algorithms that power modern biology. No preliminary knowledge of biology is required to succeed in this track. If you are a programmer, a mathematician, or a data scientist interested in working in the biotech industry, then this is the track for you.

The courses in the Bioinformatics Specialization are as follows:

1. Finding Hidden Messages in DNA
2. Genome Sequencing
3. Comparing Genes, Proteins, and Genomes
4. Deciphering Molecular Evolution
5. Genomic Data Science and Clustering
6. Finding Mutations in DNA and Proteins
7. Bioinformatics Capstone: Big Data in Biology

Best regards,
SPAdes team