Commercial and non-commercial sequence tag sets and the conformance of each to the stated or assumed distance metric (edit or Hamming).

1Hamady et al.[31] tags are from the nmeth.1184-S1.pdf supplementary file.2Hamady et al.[31] tags are Hamming distance 4 from one another in binary encoding but Hamming distance 2 from one another in nucleotide encoding.3We generated Meyer et al.[29] tags using: ‘python create_index_sequences.py -l -d 3’.4Adey et al.[41] tags are from the gb-2010-11-12-r119-s3.pdf supplementary file.5Meyer et al.[3] tags are from the nprot.2007.520-S1.doc supplementary file.6We generated Frank [42] tags using: ‘barcrawl -l -m 3’. BARCRAWL uses a hybrid approach to create distance between tags while accounting for a single deletion.This is similar to an expected edit distance of two.7Illumina Nextera tags are incorporated to either end of the template strand in combinatorial fashion to identify up to 96 samples.