Bayesian genome assembly and assessment by Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling

Most genome assemblers construct point estimates, choosing a genome sequence from among many alternative hypotheses that are supported by the data. We present a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach to sequence assembly that instead generates distributions of assembly hypotheses with posterior probabilities, providing an explicit statistical framework for evaluating alternative hypotheses and assessing assembly uncertainty. We implement this approach in a prototype assembler and illustrate its application to the bacteriophage PhiX174.