**3.2. Sequencing platform**

Sequencing platforms are available from multiple vendors such as Illumina (http://www.illu‐ mina.com/), Life Technologies (https://www.lifetechnologies.com/), and Pacific Biosciences (www.pacificbiosciences.com/), and each of the platforms has its set of advantages and disadvantages [35]. In choosing a sequencing platform, some of the factors to be considered are sequencing length, sequencing type (single end or paired end), throughput, error rate, and type of errors in the generated sequence data. The gigabytes of short reads generated from the current platforms are not error-free, which affects the downstream analysis and interpretation. For transcriptome assembly, the larger read length (such as produced from 454, PacBio) is preferred over short read length (as produced by Illumina) as it will result in assembly of the high-quality and reliable transcripts. However, both 454 and PacBio platforms have limited throughput and hence the approach most commonly used is to generate data from multiple platforms and combine the data during analysis.
