Impact of lossy compression of nanopore raw signal data on basecalling and consensus accuracy

Nanopore sequencing provides a real-time and portable solution to genomic sequencing, enabling better assembly, structural variant discovery and modified base detection than second generation technologies. The sequencing process generates a huge amount of data in the form of raw signal contained in fast5 files, which must be compressed to enable efficient storage and transfer. Since the raw data is inherently noisy, lossy compression has potential to significantly reduce space requirements without adversely impacting performance of downstream applications.