In this poster we will provide an overview of the Joint Genome Institute's Microbial Sequencing projects with an emphasis on recent efforts to improve data quality by performing various quality control operations during sequencing and prior to beginning finishing. Some of these methods have been applied tooled projects in an attempt to correct obvious data problems and, therefore, provide a minimum standard of quality satisfied by all projects. We will describe a rapid and automated protocol which removes low quality and likely contamination from our projects. Application of this protocol typically removes between 5 and 30 percent of the reads in a project without negatively affecting the number of major contigs in draft assemblies.