Coverage (genetics)

An overlap of the product of three sequencing runs, with the read sequence coverage at each point indicated.

In genetics, coverage is one of several measures of the depth or completeness of DNA sequencing, and is more specifically expressed in any of the following terms:

  • Sequence coverage (or depth) is the number of unique reads that include a given nucleotide in the reconstructed sequence.[1][2] Deep sequencing refers to the general concept of aiming for high number of unique reads of each region of a sequence.[3]
  • Physical coverage, the cumulative length of reads or read pairs expressed as a multiple of genome size.[4]
  • Genomic coverage, the percentage of all base pairs or loci of the genome covered by sequencing.
  1. ^ "Sequencing Coverage". illumina.com. Illumina education. Retrieved 2020-10-08.
  2. ^ Sims, David; Sudbery, Ian; Ilott, Nicholas E.; Heger, Andreas; Ponting, Chris P. (2014). "Sequencing depth and coverage: key considerations in genomic analyses". Nature Reviews Genetics. 15 (2): 121–132. doi:10.1038/nrg3642. PMID 24434847. S2CID 13325739.
  3. ^ Mardis, Elaine R. (2008-09-01). "Next-Generation DNA Sequencing Methods". Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. 9 (1): 387–402. doi:10.1146/annurev.genom.9.081307.164359. ISSN 1527-8204. PMID 18576944.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Ekblom was invoked but never defined (see the help page).