Oxford Nanopore is constantly improving its technology, thanks to which in May this year the latest method of basecalling – Super-accurate was introduced to users.
What is basecalling?
Basecalling is the process of processing changes in the electric potential created in the sequencing process in order to obtain information about the sequence of the genetic material.
Basecalling models
Oxford Nanopore provides 3 main basecalling models:
- Fast accuracy – is the fastest algorithm (34 Gb/h, 34 billion nucleotides/h), but the least accurate (95.8%).
- High accuracy – its speed of operation is 5 Gb/h, and its accuracy is 97.8%.
- Super-accurate – the latest model of basecalling – is the slowest (2Gb/h), but the most accurate (98.3%) of all the algorithms mentioned. The super-accurate model also increased the obtained average quality of readings by approximately 1 point on the phred score scale.
How accurate is basecalling?
Thanks to the real-time basecalling process in parallel with sequencing, despite the greater demand for computational resources, the results are obtained without delay on an ongoing basis, thanks to efficient graphics cards, which the GridION and PromethION sequencers are equipped.
The chart below shows a comparison of the accuracy of the three above-mentioned basecalling models:
Bibliography
https://link.springer.com/protocol/10.1007/978-1-0716-0868-5_9