Remove dead ends
Some read errors might occur more often than expected, either by chance or because they are systematic sequencing errors. These are not removed by the "Remove weak edges" phase and will cause "dead ends" to occur in the graph, which are short paths in the graph that terminate after a few nodes. Furthermore, the "Remove weak edges" sometimes only removes a part of the graph, which will also leave dead ends behind. Dead ends are identified by searching for paths in the graph where there exits an alternative path containing four times more nucleotides. All nodes in such paths are then removed in this step.