Base calling is the process of assigning

nucleobase Nucleobases, also known as ''nitrogenous bases'' or often simply ''bases'', are nitrogen-containing biological compounds that form nucleosides, which, in turn, are components of nucleotides, with all of these monomers constituting the basic b ...

s to

chromatogram In chemical analysis, chromatography is a laboratory technique for the separation of a mixture into its components. The mixture is dissolved in a fluid solvent (gas or liquid) called the ''mobile phase'', which carries it through a system (a ...

peaks, light intensity signals, or electrical current changes resulting from nucleotides passing through a

nanopore A nanopore is a pore of nanometer size. It may, for example, be created by a pore-forming protein or as a hole in synthetic materials such as silicon or graphene. When a nanopore is present in an electrically insulating membrane, it can be used as ...

. One computer program for accomplishing this job is Phred, which is a widely used base calling software program by both academic and commercial

DNA sequencing DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Th ...

laboratories because of its high base calling accuracy. Base callers for Nanopore sequencing use

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

s trained on current signals obtained from accurate sequencing data.

Base calling accuracy

Base calling can be assessed by two metrics, read accuracy and consensus accuracy. Read accuracy refers to the called base's accuracy to a known reference. Consensus accuracy refers to how accurate a consensus sequence is compared to overlapping reads from the same genetic locus.

References

{{reflist Molecular biology Bioinformatics