In 1980, Staden  wrote: In order to make it easier to talk about our data gained by the shotgun method of sequencing we have invented the word "contig". A contig is a set of gel readings that are related to one another by overlap of their sequences. All gel readings belong to one and only one contig, and each contig contains at least one gel reading. The gel readings in a contig can be summed to form a contiguous consensus sequence and the length of this sequence is the length of the contig.