Optimal DNA shotgun sequencing: Noisy reads are as good as noiseless reads

Abstract

We establish the fundamental limits of DNA shotgun sequencing under noisy reads. We show a surprising result: for the i.i.d. DNA model, noisy reads are as good as noiseless reads, provided that the noise level is below a certain threshold which can be surprisingly high. As an example, for a uniformly distributed DNA sequence and a symmetric substitution noisy read channel, the threshold is as high as 19%.