On Feb. 16, 2023, NIH scientists announced they had developed and released an innovative software tool to assemble truly complete (i.e., gapless) genome sequences from a variety of species. This software, called Verkko, which means ﾓnetworkﾔ in Finnish, makes the process of assembling complete genome sequences more affordable and accessible. A description of the new software was published in Nature Biotechnology.

Verkko grew from assembling the first gapless human genome sequence, which was finished last year by the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium, a collaborative project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH.