The New Dorado Basecaller is Available!

Mark Bricknell, a Realtime Analysis Fellow with Oxford Nanopore Technologies, spoke at London Calling 2023. The title of the session is “Dorado – the future of basecalling.” I have been thinking about basecalling and duplex reads today. Bricknell explained that basecalling uses recurrent neural networks that are computationally intensive to interpret raw signals into sequences. Bricknell said that a new basecaller was created with the goal of generating a new efficient basecaller and using the POD5 raw data format. The team designed the Dorado basecaller taking this and new M processors from Apple into consideration. Dorado has high-performance GPU accelerated performance. Dorado is open source and can be downloaded along with models. The commands used to run Dorado are simple and intuitive. Modified basecalling can be installed. Dorado is available now for download and will be integrated into MinKNOW! The message was that Dorado is substituting Guppy and provides flexibility and access to a series of models. I want to try adaptive sampling and modified bases with Dorado.

hands from two people opening box
How doe sthe Dorado basecalling improve Guppy and make new tools available? Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com