Re-assembly approach like human genome sequencing (Score 1)

The first thought that occurred to me as I read the description of this process of shredded paper re-assembly is that it greatly resembles the so-called 'shotgun' approach to DNA sequencing popularized by Venter et al. for use on the human genome project. There, one takes a bunch of copies of the human genomic DNA (the unshredded document(s)), then blows it apart using enzymes to yield an array of overlapping fragments (the shredding). One then sequences all the individual fragments (roughly analogous to scanning all those bits of shredded paper), and has a program match up all the overlapping fragments until the original is re-assembled.

You may ask why we 'shred' the genome in the first place? This has to do with current technical limitations of the size of a fragment that can be reliably sequenced at one time. It's as if our current 'scanners' only have flatbed areas of 1 square cm, making it necessary to do lots of individual scans of the large genome 'page' before re-assembly.

See, for example: http://nema.cap.ed.ac.uk/teaching/genomics/Genomic s3.html