DOE JGI Finishing

Finishing is a process by which the quality and sequence accuracy of shotgun draft sequence is improved to meet pre-defined finished quality standards. These standards will have a defined base pair error rate, contiguity level and assembly accuracy level.

With funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) and a collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the Stanford Human Genome Center was heavily involved in the Human Genome Project, finishing almost 11% of the genome. The Human Genome was finished using a clone-by-clone approach, with genomic DNA subcloned into a minimal tiling set of large insert clones (BACs, fosmids, cosmids etc) followed by the large insert clones being finished to a clearly defined standard. These standards (known as the Bermuda Standards) ensured that all data has a maximum estimated error rate of 1 error in 10,000 base pairs and all data is contiguous with no sequence gaps.

With continued funding from the DOE and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) we are continuing to finish both large insert clones and large organism whole genome assemblies.