Original report by Jason Vander Heiden (Bitbucket: javh, GitHub: javh).
vsearch has the --fastq_mergepairs command from usearch. Might be worth adding a wrapper for it to AssemblePairs, as it’s considerably faster. I tested usearch’s assembly a long time ago and it performed pretty well. We can’t do reference guided assembly or annotation copying, but for simple protocols where mate-pair assembly is the first step, it might be appropriate.