The recent advances in technology and upcoming improvements in throughput of third-generation sequencing, e.g., from PacBio and Oxford Nanopore, open tremendous possibilities for the analysis of DNA or RNA molecules. However, many questions remain open for the field with respect to use in research and clinic. In particular, the type of data generated from these platforms poses significant challenging for computational analysis, because of the long read length and the relatively high error rate. New methods need to be devised to enable efficient read mapping, sequence assembly, variant calling and identification of modified bases.
To address the computational and technological opportunities and challenges that are coinciding with third-generation sequencing, we organize this workshop at ECCB on best practice of using these new sequencing platforms and their data analysis. These topics will be presented by a diverse panel of speakers who are highly familiar with either Nanopore or PacBio platforms. Representatives from the major commercial players in this field, i.e. Oxford Nanopore, Pacific Biosciences and BioNano Genomics were invited to join this meeting, so as to provide a broad view on the current technological levels and to give an outlook on future improvements and computational challenges that researchers may be faced with.