Coverage after an assembly ?

Question

[Picasa]

Hi,

My output from the assembler SOAPdenovo2 is formatted like this

scaffold148 17.4

scaffold149 37.1

What is that second number ? Is it the coverage ? If yes I don't understand what it means in an assembly.

I mean the coverage is normally the number of time that a base is represented/sequenced. What does it mean in that case ??

[5heikki]

Aren't all the output files explained right here?

Answer 1

[Sej Modha]

To find out whether the second column represents coverage info, you can align the reads back to the soap2 contigs, calculate the coverage for each contig using mpileup and compare the coverage info.