title: Poretools: a toolkit for analyzing nanopore sequence data.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Nanopore sequencing may be the next disruptive technology in genomics, owing to its ability to detect single DNA molecules without prior amplification, lack of reliance on expensive optical components, and the ability to sequence long fragments. The MinION™ from Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) is the first nanopore sequencer to be commercialized and is now available to early-access users. The MinION™ is a USB-connected, portable nanopore sequencer that permits real-time analysis of streaming event data. Currently, the research community lacks a standardized toolkit for the analysis of nanopore datasets.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We introduce poretools, a flexible toolkit for exploring datasets generated by nanopore sequencing devices from MinION™ for the purposes of quality control and downstream analysis. Poretools operates directly on the native FAST5 (an application of the HDF5 standard) file format produced by ONT and provides a wealth of format conversion utilities and data exploration and visualization tools.
  
  
  METHODS
  Poretools is an open-source software and is written in Python as both a suite of command line utilities and a Python application programming interface. Source code is freely available in Github at https://www.github.com/arq5x/poretools.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microbiology and Infection, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK and Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville 22932, VA, USA.
authors.forename: Nicholas J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Loman
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microbiology and Infection, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK and Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville 22932, VA, USA.
authors.forename: Aaron R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Quinlan
mesh_terms: D058608:Nanopores; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D012984:Software