Estimating and comparing the rates of gene discovery and expressed sequence tag (EST) frequencies in EST surveys.

Motivation: Expressed sequence tag (EST) surveys are an efficient way to characterize large numbers of genes from an organism. The rate of gene discovery in an EST survey depends on the degree of redundancy of the cDNA libraries from which sequences are obtained. However, few statistical methods have been developed to assess and compare redundancies of various libraries from preliminary EST surveys.