Poretools: a toolkit for analyzing nanopore sequence data

Nicholas J Loman, Aaron R Quinlan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

224 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

MOTIVATION: Nanopore sequencing may be the next disruptive technology in genomics, owing to its ability to detect single DNA molecules without prior amplification, lack of reliance on expensive optical components, and the ability to sequence long fragments. The MinION™ from Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) is the first nanopore sequencer to be commercialized and is now available to early-access users. The MinION™ is a USB-connected, portable nanopore sequencer that permits real-time analysis of streaming event data. Currently, the research community lacks a standardized toolkit for the analysis of nanopore datasets.

RESULTS: We introduce poretools, a flexible toolkit for exploring datasets generated by nanopore sequencing devices from MinION™ for the purposes of quality control and downstream analysis. Poretools operates directly on the native FAST5 (an application of the HDF5 standard) file format produced by ONT and provides a wealth of format conversion utilities and data exploration and visualization tools.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Poretools is an open-source software and is written in Python as both a suite of command line utilities and a Python application programming interface. Source code is freely available in Github at https://www.github.com/arq5x/poretools.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3399-401
Number of pages3
JournalBioinformatics
Volume30
Issue number23
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2014

Bibliographical note

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press.

Keywords

  • Nanopores
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA
  • Software

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