>>13478366>I got the idea of breaking it up into pieces to sequence and then stitching the sequence back together by overlapThis is not unique to sequencing by synthesis. The 'stitching' process is called genome assembly and needs to be performed regardless of the sequencing platform that you're using.
I'll try to give you a rough handwavey idea how sequencing by synthesis works:
Imagine that you're in a helicopter flying overhead watching a tower get built. The tower can have 1 of 4 different kinds of floors for each level (A, C, G, or T). Every time a new floor on the tower gets built, a different color light flashes corresponding to the kind of floor was built. If you videotaped the construction and watched the recording back, you would see flashes of different colors as the tower was built and you could know how tall the tower was (how many flashes of light), and what letter each floor was.
This is how sequencing by synthesis works. Now imagine a city with hundreds of millions of towers all being built at the same time. If you flew up high enough to see them all, you could video the entire city being built all at once. This is the massively parallel aspect of platforms like Illumina and 454.
