Sequencing errors and molecular evolutionary analysis

Abstract

Heuristic approaches were used to quantify the influence that sequencing errors have on estimates of nucleotide diversity, substitution rate, and the construction of genealogies. Error rates of less than 1 nucleotide/kb probably have little affect on conclusions about the evolutionary history of highly polymorphic organisms such as Drosophila and Escherichia coli, but organisms with very low nucleotide diversity, such as humans, require greater sequencing accuracy. A scan of GenBank for corrections of previous errors reveals that sequencing errors are highly nonrandom.