Patent ID: 7133782

Claim:
A method for obtaining maximally contiguous nucleic acid sequence from a nucleic acid sequencing reaction wherein an immobilized primer-template complex is extended enzymically utilizing one or more reporter moiety-labelled nucleotides as said enzyme substrate, comprising the steps of: a) determining whether said reporter moiety is detectable and corresponds with the location of said primer-template complex; b) in the absence of any reporter moiety signal corresponding to the location of the primer-template complex, recording a pause for the corresponding primer-template complex and incrementing a corresponding pause counter; c) if the pause counter, incremented for a given primer-template complex, exceeds a predetermined threshold, deeming the base preceding the first of the consecutive pauses a mismatch and marking the base corresponding to that location accordingly in the sequence, d) if a reporter moiety is detected following step a), recording the corresponding base and assigning said base to the sequence of the said primer-template complex and setting the pause counter to zero, e) eliminating the reporter moiety attached to any incorporated base, and f) repeating steps a) to e) until the sequencing reaction is complete.