Fig. 2.

The trade-off between coverage and amount of the genome covered. A hypothetical region of the genome contains an oncogene, a tumor suppressor and two genes of uncertain significance (GUS). For visual simplicity, we show ten reads, which will get sequencing depth at genes of interest. Whole-exome sequencing is able to cover each gene with fewer reads, whereas whole-genome sequencing rarely covers a specific base with more than one read. Bear in mind, this figure is vastly understating the relative size of intergenic regions. Realistic sequencing depth goals should be much higher