Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) is a genome-wide DNA sequencing strategy designed to determine nucleotide sequence information across essentially the complete genomic DNA content of an organism or biological sample. The process comprises generation of sequence reads from genomic DNA and computational reconstruction or alignment of those reads to produce genome-scale sequence information from which nucleotide substitutions, insertions and deletions, structural variants, and other forms of genomic variation can be identified ^[1][2]. WGS data may be represented as a de novo genome assembly, a consensus sequence relative to a reference genome, or a genome-wide catalogue of sequence variants, depending on the analytical design ^[1][2][3]. Within genomics and phylogenetic studies, homologous genome-wide sequence positions and variants provide characters for estimating genetic relatedness, population structure, evolutionary histories, and phylogenetic relationships ^[4]. The defining scope of WGS therefore extends from genome-scale sequence acquisition through the primary computational reconstruction and variant characterization required to represent the sequenced genome ^[2][3][4].