Figure 5. Experimental designs for detecting a single species and obtaining contigs representative of a pool of genomes.

Intersection between the left (blue) and right (green) sides of Eqs. 2 and 3 indicate the number of length 200 reads necessary to have 95% confidence of obtaining at least one contig with minimal size of 4 reads from a novel genome of length 200000 bases pooled with 100 like-sized genomes, and from each of 100 pooled genomes of length 200000 respectively. Detecting a single novel species requires 47213 reads, expected to allocate 467 to the novel species. Detecting contigs representative of the pool of genomes requires 62402 reads, expected to allocate 624 to each species. These results are consistent with those described in Figs. 3 and 4.