In whole-genome assembly, the BAC fragments (red line segments) and the reads from five individuals (black line segments) are combined to produce a contig and a consensus sequence (green line).

Chances are you've seen an illustration of DNA's double-helix structure and even pictures of the chromosomes that comprise the human genome. But where and how does the famous double helix fit into ...

The process of breaking up the human genome into BACs was laborious, but it reduced the genome assembly problem to a manageable scale—closer to the size of viral and bacterial genomes that had been ...