The performance of software tools for de novo transcriptome assembly greatly depends on the selection of software parameters. Up to now, the development of de novo transcriptome assembly for prokaryotes has not been as remarkable as that for eukaryotes. In this contribution, Rockhopper2 was used to perform a comparative transcriptome analysis of Streptomyces clavuligerus exposed to diverse environmental conditions. The study focused on assessing the incidence of software parameters on software performance for the identification of differentially expressed genes as a final goal. For this, a statistical optimization was performed using the Transrate Assembly Score (TAS). TAS was also used for evaluating the software performance and for comparing it with related tools, e.g., Trinity. Transcriptome redundancy and completeness were also considered for this analysis. Rockhopper2 and Trinity reached a TAS value of 0.55092 and 0.58337, respectively. Trinity assembles transcriptomes with high redundancy, with 55.6% of transcripts having some duplicates. Additionally, we observed that the total number of differentially expressed genes (DEG) and their annotation greatly depends on the method used for removing redundancy and the tools used for transcript quantification. To our knowledge, this is the first work aimed at assessing de novo assembly software for prokaryotic organisms. complete transcription map [1]. De novo transcriptome assembly is necessary for organisms whose genomes have been neither sequenced nor annotated, e.g., for non-model organisms, when analyzing complex microbial communities, in meta-transcriptome studies, or while investigating uncultivable microorganisms [5][6][7]. Many software tools have been developed to assemble transcriptomes using the de novo strategy. The most commonly used are: Trinity [3,8], Oases [6], Bridger [9], SOAPdenovo-Trans [10], IDBA-Trans [11], SSP [12], Shannon [13], BinPacker [14] and Rockhopper2 [5].De novo assembly is very sensitive to software parameters due to the lack of a genome to guide the assembly and the type of algorithms used which are mostly based on the De Bruijn graphs. Thus, they depend on the k-mer length [14] or on the minimum k-mer coverage [3]. Moreover, the consistency and biological relevance of the data, obtained from different sources, make it challenging to select the most accurate assembly [15,16], and the same data can generate substantially different assemblies, both within and between assembly methods, affecting the biological analysis and its conclusions [17]. In this regard, some authors have undertaken the task of evaluating the impact of different methodologies and software configurations on the quality of the assembled transcriptome [18][19][20][21][22].Different software are available for evaluating the quality of a de novo assembly, e.g., SCAN [23], rnaQUAST [24], DETONATE [16], Transrate [17] and recently, a topology-based method called Branching Measure [25]. For the case of Transrate, it renders a Transrate Assembly Score (TAS) that allow...