The Dorado basecaller has been on my mind and appearing in different Nanopore resources. Tonight I watched Mike Vella, Director of Machine Learning Operations at Oxford Nanopore Technologies, present an update on Dorado at the Nanopore Community Meeting 2022. Vella spoke about why we need another basecaller, as Nanopore has Bonito and Guppy. Vella explained that Dorado incorporates several updates. The goals for designing Dorado were: ease of use with simple commands, high-speed, automatic hardware configuration, and rapid iteration. They will release updates early and often on GitHub, according to Vella. They committed that it would be an open source resource with community contributions. POD5 files allow for fast read and write. Vella did indicate that Dorado will be integrated with MinKNOW. They also recommended Dorado for base calling. The high accuracy basecalling is faster and more stable than Guppy. Dorado does run on M1 Mac chips, and work is being performed to support iPad use. It seems Dorado is going to replace Guppy in “the near future” and now hardware limitations may complicate “keeping up” with complex basecalling. Nonetheless, Dorado offers speed and features that will make it essential. I want to use it with MinKNOW!
