Coverage (genetics)

In genetics, coverage is one of several measures of the depth or completeness of DNA sequencing, and is more specifically expressed in any of the following terms:

• Sequence coverage (or depth) is the number of unique reads that include a given nucleotide in the reconstructed sequence. Deep sequencing refers to the general concept of aiming for high number of unique reads of each region of a sequence.
• Physical coverage, the cumulative length of reads or read pairs expressed as a multiple of genome size.
• Genomic coverage, the percentage of all base pairs or loci of the genome covered by sequencing.