Fig. 2

Variance of allele balance derived from reads generated for synthetic E. coli “polyploids”. a Allele balance histograms produced from variant calls of synthetic E. coli datasets using simulated reads. At 10× it is hard to visually distinguish between diploids and polyploids due to the dominant 0.5× bar. At 100× it is possible to visually distinguish between ploidies. Additional downsampled allele balance histograms and ploidies are presented in Additional file 1: Fig S2. b Variance of allele frequencies were calculated from the same data and could distinguish the synthetic diploid from synthetic polyploids. The variance of allele frequencies begins to converge at 10×, although they can still be differentiated