Will they really be able to sequence the full Neandertal genome in two years?
I got a lot of questions from journalists on this point. I really see no reason to doubt it — they know their average sequence yield from a given amount of extract, and the proportion of that yield that is actually Neandertal DNA. The main caveat is a statistical one: 3 billion base pairs of sequence is — on average — one full coverage of the genome, but in practice some loci will be sequenced many times, while a fairly large proportion (a bit over 30 percent) won’t be sequenced at all. A billion missing bases may not seem like a big deal, but there is a catch: the short average fragment size means that the missing patches will be distributed throughout every gene. Since the average gene covers a region of a few kilobases, complete gene sequences will be pretty rare — most will have gaps in them amounting to around 30 percent of their length.
Related Questions
- We all know that the Neandertal genome is riddled with contamination from modern humans. Isn the null hypothesis that we have a modern human sequence here because it is a modern human?
- I can’t see a reference sequence in the IGV (Illumina Genome Viewer) or ICB (Illumina Chromosome Browser). How can I display a reference sequence?
- Will they really be able to sequence the full Neandertal genome in two years?
