An intermediate grade of finished genomic sequence suitable for comparative analyses.

Although the cost of generating draft-quality genomic sequence continues to decline, refining that sequence by the process of "sequence finishing" remains expensive. Near-perfect finished sequence is an appropriate goal for the human genome and a small set of reference genomes; however, such a high-quality product cannot be cost-justified for large numbers of additional genomes, at least for the foreseeable future. Here we describe the generation and quality of an intermediate grade of finished genomic sequence (termed comparative-grade finished sequence), which is tailored for use in multispecies sequence comparisons.