Week's Bioinformatic Term:

Contig

1. The term comes from a shortening of the word ‘contiguous’ and has several uses.
2. More often, the term ‘contig’ is used to refer to the product of a shotgun sequencing* which represents overlapping sequences of genes derived from single genome.
3. A ‘contig’ may refer to a map showing placement of a set of clones that completely, contiguously cover some segment of DNA in which you are interested. This is also called the ‘minimal tiling path’.

*In brief, Shotgun sequencing involves cloning of DNA fragments randomly generated from a genome. The DNA fragments are then sequenced and assembled to yield a continuous sequence without gaps.