Dear SPAdes community,

Since its birth in 2012 SPAdes has always been a free and open-source software, mainly supported by various academic and non-profit organization grants. However, since 2022 SPAdes is not developed within a certain academic institution anymore. SPAdes is currently maintained and supported by an international group of volunteering contributors, namely, a SPAdes team.

Our old website is not active anymore. We also do not have a dedicated support email. From now on we are relying only on our GitHub repo. Please, download releases and report issues there. SPAdes has revamped documentation available at ablab.github.io/spades/.

SPAdes 4.0 will most likely be the last major release introducing new features and significant changes. No further development is currently planned. Nonetheless, we strongly intend to continue making bug-fix releases and supporting our users. And as always — patches are welcome!

With love and happy assembling SPAdes team

Full changelog for SPAdes 4.0.0:

• SPAdes now supports NCBI SRA files as input;
• Reworked and improved documentation: ablab.github.io;
• PathRacer - a tool for mapping HMMs to assembly grpah - is now released as a part of SPAdes package;
• BinSPreader (metagenomic binning refiner) is also released inside SPAdes package;
• New gfa-split tool for splitting assembly graph into components;
• New wasterwaterSPAdes mode for quantitative assessment of SARS-CoV-2 strains in waste water samples;
• Python3.8 is now a minimal required version, python2 is deprecated;
• Native support for running on Apple Silicon processors;
• Native support for running on aarch64/linux;
• Binaries are now built using ManyLinux 2.28. SPAdes binaries should be compatible with systems using glibc 2.28 and newer including ALT Linux 10+, RHEL 9+, Debian 11+, Fedora 34+, Mageia 8+, Photon OS 3.0 with updates, Ubuntu 21.04+. In case of any problems we recommend building from sources.