RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Do Read Errors Matter for Genome Assembly? JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 014399 DO 10.1101/014399 A1 Ilan Shomorony A1 Thomas Courtade A1 David Tse YR 2015 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/01/26/014399.abstract 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.