Nanopore/pyrosequencing technology is interesting in that the class of errors that it is most susceptible to (homopolymer inaccuracies) nearly do not exist in more traditional base-by-base sequencing.
These have proven harder to correct than simple substitution errors - this is both a fault of the bias of existing tooling, and also a difficult problem in general. Roche and other companies have had a lot of smart people working on this problem.
Increasing coverage will definitely help resolve these errors, but the coverage required may be such that it's more cost effective to use a more traditional sequencer.
A homopolymer is when you have stretches of the same nucleotide, and the error is miscounting the number of them. e.g: GAAAC could be called as "GAAC" or "GAAAAC" or even "GAAAAAAAC".
What? Have you ever looked at a sanger trace with homopolymer stretches? Depending on how blotchy it is, After about 7 you might not really be sure, and it definitely gets the n wrong occasionally even with nicely resolved peaks.
I'm not defending nanopores here, frankly I'm not convinced about them yet.
These have proven harder to correct than simple substitution errors - this is both a fault of the bias of existing tooling, and also a difficult problem in general. Roche and other companies have had a lot of smart people working on this problem.
Increasing coverage will definitely help resolve these errors, but the coverage required may be such that it's more cost effective to use a more traditional sequencer.
A homopolymer is when you have stretches of the same nucleotide, and the error is miscounting the number of them. e.g: GAAAC could be called as "GAAC" or "GAAAAC" or even "GAAAAAAAC".