In
bioinformatics,
sequence assembly refers to
aligning and merging fragments from a longer
DNA sequence in order to reconstruct the original sequence. This is needed as
DNA sequencing technology cannot read whole genomes in one go, but rather reads small pieces of between 20 and 30000 bases, depending on the technology used. Typically the short fragments, called reads, result from
shotgun sequencing genomic DNA, or
gene transcript (
ESTs).