{
  "status": "research",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-10-18",
  "slug": "oligonucleotide-dropout",
  "term": "Oligonucleotide dropout",
  "aliases": [
    "DNA sequence dropout"
  ],
  "definition": "Oligonucleotide dropout is the absence of an intended DNA sequence identity from the reads available for reconstruction.",
  "note": "Copies of another identity do not fill the missing position. Dropout must be defined at a particular processing stage, because filtering changes which reads reach a decoder. [hesela-coverage]\n\nFor N independent draws and per-draw identity probabilities p_i, the expected unseen count is sum_i (1-p_i)^N. It is not the probability of losing any identity. Error correction may recover a file even with absent encoded fragments. [heckel2017] [hesela-coverage]",
  "related": [
    "dna-data-storage",
    "sequencing-coverage",
    "symbol-erasure",
    "erasure-coding"
  ],
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "heckel2017",
      "title": "Heckel, Shomorony, Ramchandran and Tse. Fundamental Limits of DNA Storage Systems. arXiv:1705.04732v1 (2017)",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.04732v1",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    },
    {
      "id": "hesela-coverage",
      "title": "Hesela: DNA storage, uneven sampling and missing sequences",
      "url": "https://hesela.com/analyses/dna-storage-coverage-and-dropout/",
      "accessed": "2026-10-18"
    }
  ],
  "provenance": [
    "The finite sampling calculation assumes error-free identity recognition; its uneven probability distribution is synthetic, not a fitted DNA population."
  ]
}