关于NGS中“depth”和“coverage”的理解

一直不理解“深度”Depth"和覆盖度“Coverage”的概念，最近在BioStar上找到了这样一篇Nature Review上的关于这两个概念的介绍，以下是从paper中摘录的内容。

Genomics is extending its reach into diverse fields of
biomedical research from agriculture to clinical diagnostics. Despite sharp falls in recent years, sequencing costs remain substantial and vary for different types of experiment. Consequently, in all of these fields investigators are seeking experimental designs that generate robust scientific findings for the lowest sequencing cost. Higher coverage of sequencing (BOX 1) inevitably requires higher costs. The theoretical or expected coverage is the average number of times that each nucleotide
is expected to be sequenced given a certain number of reads of a given length and the assumption that reads are randomly distributed across an idealized genome.
Actual empirical per-base coverage represents the exact number of times that a base in the reference is covered by a high-quality aligned read from a given sequencing experiment. Redundancy of coverage is also called the depth or the depth of coverage. In next-generation sequencing studies coverage is often quoted as average raw or aligned read depth, which denotes the expected coverage on the basis of the number and the length
of high-quality reads before or after alignment to the reference. Although the terms depth and coverage can be used interchangeably (as they are in this Review), coverage has also been used to denote the breadth of coverage of a target genome, which is defined as the percentage of target bases that are sequenced a given number of times. ***For example, a genome sequencing study may sequence a genome to 30× average depth and achieve a 95% breadth of coverage of the reference genome at a minimum depth of ten reads.***

**结论：**两者没有什么太大的区别，都可以表示NGS的测序水平。测序深度更偏向于整体测了多少次，而覆盖度更偏向于基因组宽度cover了多少

原文链接：https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24434847/
BioStar链接：https://www.biostars.org/p/638/#148631