Patent ID: 6864052

Claim:
A method of identifying one or more sequences of a target nucleic acid comprising: a. contacting a target nucleic acid with a first set of pools of probes, wherein at least one pool in the set comprises a mixture of two or more probes having different sequences in information regions of the probes, under conditions which produce, on average, more probe:target hybridization with probes which are perfectly complementary to the target nucleic acid in the information region of the probes than with probes which are mismatched in the information regions; b. detecting a first subset of pools for which a level of hybridization indicates that there is at least one perfectly complementary probe within each pool; and c. identifying one or more sequences of the target nucleic acid from the first subset of pools detected in step (b) by compiling overlapping sequences of the information regions of the probes in the subset of detected pools, wherein one or more pooling false positive probes are eliminated as a result of compilation of overlapping sequences.