Information theory for DNA sequencing: Part I: A basic model

DNA sequencing is the basic workhorse of modern day biology and medicine. Shotgun sequencing is the dominant technique used: many randomly located short fragments called reads are extracted from the DNA sequence, and these reads are assembled to reconstruct the original sequence. By drawing an analogy between the DNA sequencing problem and the classic communication problem, we define an information theoretic notion of sequencing capacity. This is the maximum number of DNA base pairs that can be resolved reliably per read, and provides a fundamental limit to the performance that can be achieved by any assembly algorithm. We compute the sequencing capacity explicitly for a simple statistical model of the DNA sequence and the read process.