[gringer]

When you join with the program, you get discount vouchers for a set of flow cells and reagent kits, and these vouchers are also handed out for various other reasons (e.g. conference talks, publications, popular community wiki posts). The discount is frequently for the total cost of kits, but participants still need to pay for shipping.

Since they opened up the commercial space after the London Calling conference in May, ONT's stance has been that people who pay will get ordering/shipping priority over those who are getting shipping-cost-only kits and flow cells. I expect that this means there are a lot of small labs around the world getting frustrated waiting for their first kits to find out if the platform is useful at all, while big facilities with deep pockets get the lions share of the sequencing capacity.

[sshen]

Yes, and I've also been part of the MAP since the start, and have mentioned my involvement with MAP previously on SEQanswers. It's silly to repeat that every time I talk about the MinION, because everyone who has access to a MinION sequencer has received some amount of shipping-cost-only flow cells and reagents from Oxford Nanopore.

The only way you're going to find an interest-free analysis is if someone from outside MAP takes some of the publically-available data and does their own analysis on that. Based on how much feedback I've got on the mitochondrial data I released last year (i.e. none), don't get your hopes up on that.

It's also currently impossible to re-call event data without having access to Metrichor, so unless someone from outside MAP writes their own base caller everyone is stuck with what ONT throws at them.

Perhaps our MARC paper will change that, because it's a bit more public and has a lot more pre-analysed and mapped data for other people to look at.

Is Metrichor open source? We are actually interested in developing a base caller for minIon data. If someone with experience would like to work together, please let me know. Thanks!

[gringer]

If someone with experience would like to work together, please let me know. Thanks!

Yes, please. I have a lot of experience with the MinION, but unfortunately not much time.

There's quite a difference between open source and free (as in freedom). You can blame Microsoft for blurring the lines with that. A lot of the MinION stuff is "open source", but still closed due to a restrictive license.

However, while the MinKNOW code is almost all python and available for viewing on the local machine, I haven't seen any Metrichor code. ONT haven't been particularly keen to release their base-caller code, but have given us their rough algorithm; it's enough that a programmer familiar with signal processing could make something that's pretty close to what ONT has done.

[sshen]

Yes, please. I have a lot of experience with the MinION, but unfortunately not much time.

There's quite a difference between open source and free (as in freedom). You can blame Microsoft for blurring the lines with that. A lot of the MinION stuff is "open source", but still closed due to a restrictive license.

However, while the MinKNOW code is almost all python and available for viewing on the local machine, I haven't seen any Metrichor code. ONT haven't been particularly keen to release their base-caller code, but have given us their rough algorithm; it's enough that a programmer familiar with signal processing could make something that's pretty close to what ONT has done.

Glad to know you are interested in such work. I have been reading some articles (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dgovinda/pdf/...and-cvpr97.pdf) and thought that ONT algorithm is possible to be improved. But without knowing a bit detail of it, it's hard to get anything down.

I don't have much time to code either. But if others are also interested in creating better base caller, we should form a group. I also have a small funding for this work, which will be used for compensating people's time.

Sorry if this isn't a right place for such discussion.