PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ilan Shomorony
AU  - Thomas Courtade
AU  - David Tse
TI  - Do Read Errors Matter for Genome Assembly?
AID  - 10.1101/014399
DP  - 2015 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 014399
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/01/26/014399.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/01/26/014399.full
AB  - While most current high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies generate short reads with low error rates, emerging sequencing technologies generate long reads with high error rates. A basic question of interest is the tradeoff between read length and error rate in terms of the information needed for the perfect assembly of the genome. Using an adversarial erasure error model, we make progress on this problem by establishing a critical read length, as a function of the genome and the error rate, above which perfect assembly is guaranteed. For several real genomes, including those from the GAGE dataset, we verify that this critical read length is not significantly greater than the read length required for perfect assembly from reads without errors.