We study the shape of coverage functions resulting from the sequencing of random genome fragments, and show that they can be described by Galton-Watson trees. This extends standard analyses of shotgun sequencing that focus on coverage statistics at individual sites, and provides a null model for detecting deviations from random coverage in high-throughput sequence census based experiments such as ChIP-Seq.
Steven N. Evans, Valerie Hower, Lior Pachter