Fig. 3

Chimeric reads may introduce contamination. The reference is a gene or a functional site (long green bar). The reads are represented by short lines. Green reads are sequenced from the reference. Red color represents sequences from another species. a. When the overlap cutoff is small, a chimeric read can be extended and thus recruits reads from other species. b. When the overlap cutoff is bigger than half of the read size, a chimeric read could be recruited but will not be extended in the following iterations