Oxford Nanopore's handheld MinION sequencer is being unfairly characterized as having a high error rate, according to this post from influential bioinformatician, PacBio. 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.
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.