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Introduction to nanopore sequencing accuracy
Oxford Nanopore's sequencing accuracy is shown as one of several metrics:
- per-base quality score, denoted by the Phred Q-score
- raw read quality. This is calculated as an average from the q-scores, and this average quality is calibrated vs accuracy.
- raw read accuracy. Accuracy is calculated from an alignment to a reference sequence and counts insertions, deletions and substitutions as errors (bases correct / (insertions + deletions + bases aligned)), e.g. 99% accuracy can be interpreted as 99 out of 100 bases in a read were called correctly. Note that Oxford Nanopore Technologies represents the average raw read accuracy as the modal per-read accuracy from a sequencing run
Sequencing accuracy is determined by multiple factors, such as pore chemistry and basecalling algorithms. Improvements in these areas over the last several years have led to a steady increase in both single-molecule and consensus accuracy.
For more information about our latest accuracy data, please see the Accuracy page on the Oxford Nanopore website.