Figure 1. Discretizations of shotgun genome sequencing.

In the non-discretized model, reads (red) are derived from a genome (green) and assembled into contigs (blue). Contig assembly relies on overlap between reads. In the Wendl (2006b) discretization, the genome is partitioned into a number of read-sized bins. Reads are distributed amongst these bins, and a contig can be regarded as a sequence of occupied bins. In the expectation overlap tiling, a secondary set of read-sized bins overlap those from the Wendl discretization, and a contig of size defined in an integer number of bins can be obtained from a sequence of occupied Wendl or overlap bins independently.