(created by Jason Baumohl, formerly of JGI)
Assembly is the process of using sequence similarity to cluster collections of sequencing reads or paired reads into the longest or highest quality contiguous sequence (a.k.a. contig).
Putting this in simpler terms,
- Shotgun library creation can be likened to taking the text from 100 copies of an unknown book and randomly cutting that text at various points in each of the copies.
- Sequencing is then similar to reading the first and last ten letters in all of the fragments of text.
- Genome assembly is trying to reassemble a complete copy of the book using all of the fragments of text.