Polina Muzyukina, Sofia Medvedeva, Konstantin Severinov and Ekaterina Savitskaya (passed away in 2019) co-authored a paper “SCRAMBLER: A Tool for De Novo CRISPR Array Reconstruction and Its Application for Analysis of the Structure of Prokaryotic Populations” that was published in the CRISPR journal. The scientists developed an open-source software SCRAMBLER (github.com/biolab-tools/SCRAMBLER), a novel tool that includes several pipelines for assembling CRISPR arrays from high-throughput short-read sequencing data. They assessed its performance with model data sets (Escherichia coli strains containing different CRISPR arrays and imitating prokaryotic communities of different complexities) and intestinal microbiomes of extant and extinct pachyderms. The researchers demonstrated that SCRAMBLER can assemble CRISPR arrays correctly from reads containing pairs of spacers, yielding a precision rate of >80% and a recall rate of 60–85% when checked against ground-truth data. Likewise, SCRAMBLER successfully assembled CRISPR arrays from the environmental samples. Full text of the paper is available here.