Oxford Nanopore's handheld MinION sequencer is being unfairly characterized as having a high error rate, according to this post from influential bioinformatician, Mick Watson. The article was written by Watson and published in the journal Nature on May 13, 2014. Thus, the commonly cited 10% error rate of the MinION is not representative. Some "errors" are signal that is being misinterpreted, a finding that may reveal new possibilities in genomics.
Oxford Nanopore's handheld MinION sequencer is being unfairly characterized as having a high error rate, according to this post from influential bioinformatician, Mick Watson. DNA is actually more complex than our four-base abstraction of it, meaning it picks up signals from bases which are not just A, G, C and T, and in the process of compressing the MinION's results down to only four bases, errors occur. Thus, the commonly cited 10% error rate of the MinION is not representative. Some "errors" are signal that is being misinterpreted, a finding that may reveal new possibilities in genomics.