Hey, Phred, Thanks for the Inaccuracies

Following up on her post last week asking about the accuracy of basecallers, Sandra Porter writes that she succeeded in her quest to find someone who had done a thorough study of chromatogram data processed with phred. Applied Biosystems and collaborators at Wash U and Baylor did work on this a few years ago in a review of 20,000 chromatograms. The upshot, in a quote from ABI's results: "Since phred replaces (and ignores) the initial called sequence, re-processing KB-analyzed samples with phred will, on average, degrade the accuracy of the analysis in terms of actual sequence error," according to the post.