sequence coverage wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing MC, 20101201: old definition was "A sequencing specification that describes the average number of times a nucleotide position was sequenced to obtain a consensus." Moved from sequencing specification to measurement datum Sequence coverage is the average number of reads representing a given nucleotide in the reconstructed sequence. It can be calculated from the length of the original genome (G), the number of reads(N), and the average read length(L) as N * L/G. For example, a hypothetical genome with 2,000 base pairs reconstructed from 8 reads with an average length of 500 nucleotides will have 2x redundancy. This parameter also enables one to estimate other quantities, such as the percentage of the genome covered by reads (sometimes also called coverage).