Real-Time Demultiplexing Nanopore Barcoded Sequencing Data With npBarcode

Abstract

MotivationThe recently introduced barcoding protocol to Oxford Nanopore sequencing has increased the versatility of the technology. Several bioinformatic tools have been developed to demultiplex the barcoded reads, but none of them support the streaming analysis. This limits the use of pooled sequencing in real-time applications, which is one of the main advantages of the technology.\n\nResultsWe introduced npBarcode, an open source and cross platform tool for barcode demultiplex in streaming fashion. npBarcode can be seamlessly integrated into a streaming analysis pipeline. The tool also provides a friendly graphical user interface through npReader, allowing the real-time visual monitoring of the sequencing progress of barcoded samples. We show that npBarcode achieves comparable accuracies to the other alternatives.\n\nAvailabilitynpBarcode is bundled in Japsa - a Java tools kit for genome analysis, and is freely available at https://github.com/hsnguyen/npBarcode.