A mathematical framework for centromere-aware evaluation of human genome assemblies

Luca Franco; Matteo Migliarini; Matteo Tommaso Ungaro; Egnald Çela; Luca Corda; Andreas Giannis; Ester Mondelli; Fabio Galasso; Simona Giunta

arXiv · 2606.11276

A mathematical framework for centromere-aware evaluation of human genome assemblies

Luca Franco·Matteo Migliarini·Matteo Tommaso Ungaro·Egnald Çela·Luca Corda·Andreas Giannis·Ester Mondelli·Fabio Galasso·Simona Giunta

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Abstract

Accurate evaluation of genome assemblies within highly repetitive regions, such as centromeres, remains a major open challenge in genomics. Conventional benchmarking relies on sequence alignment, which becomes problematic in regions of high homogeneity and divergence. Here, we framed centromere assembly evaluation as a comparative distribution problem in a compact centeny representation by computing genomic distances between functional motifs, rather than relying on nucleotide sequence. Our distribution-based metric assesses agreement between a query and a target chromosome by comparing their centromeric inter-motif distances rendered by KL divergence. When applied genome-wide to currently available human telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genomes, this approach yields an accuracy ranking for the entire assembly and for each individual chromosome. Altogether, we present a rapid and robust scoring system based on genomes numerical rendering of inter-motif distances, that provides a quantitative standard of assembly integrity in repetitive DNA regions and establishes a bona fide framework for chromosome-level genome-to-genome comparison.

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Luca Franco, Matteo Migliarini, Matteo Tommaso Ungaro, Egnald Çela, Luca Corda, Andreas Giannis, Ester Mondelli, Fabio Galasso, Simona Giunta. 2026-06-09. A mathematical framework for centromere-aware evaluation of human genome assemblies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11276

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