I was reading a paper when I read this sentence: "[...] five random libraries with four types of cloning vectors were constructed from the total cellular DNA to minimize the cloning bias."
Cloning bias is a tendency of certain regions of the genome to be cloned less often than others during sequencing, and thus less likely to be sequenced. This results in a lower expected read coverage in these regions, which magnifies the gap-producing effects of random chance. To get enough data to sequence these regions, a higher overall coverage is needed. The most prominent cause of cloning bias is AT-richness, which affects cloning rates in the Sanger sequencing process. In 454 sequencing process, another kind of cloning bias causes homopolymers to be counted incorrectly.
As for the _sources_ of cloning biases, some sequences, by chance, contain signals that interfere with the biology of a particular cloning vector (they may contain an inverted palindromic sequence which causes the replication of the insert in that cloning vector to stall, among other causes); some cloning vectors have specific preferences for sequences at the ends of the insert, which may be more common in some regions of the genome than others; some cloning vectors have preferences for sequences in a given range of lengths, which may be more difficult to produce from some regions of the genome than others.