. 2017 Aug 1;35(8):725–731. doi: 10.1038/nbt.3893

Table 1.

Genome reporting standards for SAGs and MAGs

Criterion	Description
Finished (SAG/MAG)
Assembly quality^a	Single contiguous sequence without gaps or ambiguities with a consensus error rate equivalent to Q50 or better
High-quality draft (SAG/MAG)
Assembly quality^a	Multiple fragments where gaps span repetitive regions. Presence of the 23S, 16S, and 5S rRNA genes and at least 18 tRNAs.
Completion^b	>90%
Contamination^c	<5%
Medium-quality draft (SAG/MAG)
Assembly quality^a	Many fragments with little to no review of assembly other than reporting of standard assembly statistics.
Completion^b	≥50%
Contamination^c	<10%
Low-quality draft (SAG/MAG)
Assembly quality^a	Many fragments with little to no review of assembly other than reporting of standard assembly statistics.
Completion^b	<50%
Contamination^c	<10%
This is a compressed set of genome reporting standards for SAGs and MAGs. For a complete list of mandatory and optional standards, see Supplementary Table 1.

^aAssembly statistics include but are not limited to: N50, L50, largest contig, number of contigs, assembly size, percentage of reads that map back to the assembly, and number of predicted genes per genome.

^bCompletion: ratio of observed single-copy marker genes to total single-copy marker genes in chosen marker gene set.

^cContamination: ratio of observed single-copy marker genes in ≥2 copies to total single-copy marker genes in chosen marker gene set.