Should the draft chimpanzee sequence be finished?

Owing to the availability of genome working drafts (WDs), current comparative-sequence studies are frequently performed on a genome-wide scale. In this article, we appraise the utility of WD sequences in the detection of genomic differences in closely related species. We compared human DNA sequences with draft and high-quality versions of the corresponding chimpanzee loci to reveal the overall high quality of the chimp WD sequence. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the differences between WD and high-quality sequences we observed can be attributed to sequencing errors in the draft. Although we suggest methods to reduce the number of such false positives efficiently, our study emphasizes the benefit expected from finishing the chimpanzee genome sequence.