NanoClass objectives

NanoClass was developed to:

1. Enable biologist and students to classify their own samples, without prior expertise in bioinformatics. The convenience and portability of the Nanopore MinION make it increasingly popular for applications in research and education, but subsequent bioinformatic analysis of the data often requires expert knowledge.

2. Allow biologists and students to evaluate which tool performs best on their data. While MinION technology allows for the sequencing of entire marker genes, error rates are still substantial in comparison to the short but highly accurate short read technologies. This poses three mayor challenges for taxonomic classification, which make it hard to predict the performance of individual tools on communities of variable complexity.

• Accuracy - Accurate taxonomic assignment despite high error rates can be challenging, especially for tools that were developped with the error profiles of highly accurate next generation sequences in mind.

• Computational efficiency - High error rates dictate that each sequence is taxonomically annotated in stead of a priori clustering into ASV/OTU tables as is customary for Next generation sequences.

• Novelty - One tool rarely fits all and gold-standards for this novel sequencing technology are still lacking.