The following paragraphs describe the draft simulation process in greater detail. First, the 5 0 end of the sequence is simulated as missing or present according to a random (Bernoulli) trial based on the probability of there being a gap in the sequence data. If simulations randomly determine that the first part of the sequence is missing, then the size of the missing segment is selected randomly from a uniform distribution ranging from the minimum gap size to the maximum gap size. The length of the first contig is selected randomly from an exponential distribution with a non-zero minimum contig size and a maximum contig size that is a fraction of the mean genome length for the species. The mean of this exponential distribution is also specified as a fraction of the mean genome length.