Sequence Finishing

Sequence “finishing” is the process of turning a rough draft assembly composed of shotgun sequencing reads into a highly accurate finished DNA sequence with a defined maximum allowed error rate. The standard established by the international publicly funded sequencing community for considering a sequence finished is that it be completely contiguous, with no gaps in the sequence, and that it have a final estimated error rate of <1 error in 10,000 bases. Various groups have produced finished sequences of entire genomes—in some cases with whole-genome shotgun strategies and in others with large-insert clones covering the genome—as well as of several entire human chromosomes.