Unexpected cross-species contamination in genome sequencing projects
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - 14:31
in Biology & Nature
As genome sequencing has gotten faster and cheaper, the pace of whole-genome sequencing has accelerated, dramatically increasing the number of genomes deposited in public archives. Although these genomes are a valuable resource, problems can arise when researchers misapply computational methods to assemble them, or accidentally introduce unnoticed contaminations during sequencing.