Paired-end sequencing of the genome of Escherichia coli K-12 strain MG1655 using the Illumina Genome Analyzer II

E. coli K-12 holds a key position as a model organism in studies of molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics and biotechnology. A high-quality reference sequence of the genome of E. coli K-12 strain MG1655 has previously been generated using the Sanger dideoxy sequencing method (Reference sequence accession: NC_000913). We have re-sequenced the genome of the MG1655 strain using the Illumina Genome Analyzer II to provide a paired-end, 100 base sequence dataset for development of de novo sequence assembly algorithms or other downstream analysis tools.