Data Reduction in SARS-CoV-2 Amplicon Sequencing: Effects of Read Subsampling and Normalization on Consensus Quality, Lineage Assignment, and Computational Burden
Background: Amplicon-based next-generation sequencing is a cornerstone of viral genomic surveillance, but it often produces datasets with highly uneven read coverage due to PCR amplification bias. This leads to excessive data generation and substantial computational overhead for downstream bioinformatic analysis. Resul...