New Blog Post from Gene Myers on "Intrinsic Quality Values" of Pacbio Sequences
We like to alert our readers about a new blog post from Gene Myers on assembly of Pacbio reads. In it, Myers wrote about his frustration with incorporating quality scores coming out the machines -
I tried every way I could think of to aggregate these Q-scores over a say 100bp interval so as to arrive at an informative statistic about the overall quality of that 100bp stretch and failed.
After using a new method to analyze ‘regional read piles”,
(
Hopefully, the examples and exposition above make it clear that analyzing read piles is pretty interesting and informative.
)
he concluded -
It is a matter of experience, but my general finding is that of the QVs not capped at 50, about 80% of the data is definitely usable and 5-7% is definitely bad, leaving the rest in a grey zone.
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Intrinsic Quality Values - Gene Myers
One of the most vexing problems with Pacbio data is that it is very difficult to understand the quality of a given small segment or region of a read. The Q-scores that come out of the instrument are not particularly informative in this regard, their value seems to be mostly in indicating if a given base is better or worse than the bases neighboring it (and this is of importance to multi-aligners and consensus callers like Quiver). I tried every way I could think of to aggregate these Q-scores over a say 100bp interval so as to arrive at an informative statistic about the overall quality of that 100bp stretch and failed. But having this information is very important because over the course of a long 10-40Kbp read, the quality of the base calls varies significantly, where there are even long internal stretches that are essentially junk. I illustrate a typical Pacbio read error profile to help you further understand why I think it is extremely important to understand the regional quality of a read.
