RawHash2: mapping raw nanopore signals using hash-based seeding and adaptive quantization

Raw nanopore signals can be analyzed while they are being generated, a process known as real-time analysis. Real-time analysis of raw signals is essential to utilize the unique features that nanopore sequencing provides, enabling the early stopping of the sequencing of a read or the entire sequencing run based on the analysis. The state-of-the-art mechanism, RawHash, offers the first hash-based efficient and accurate similarity identification between raw signals and a reference genome by quickly matching their hash values. In this work, we introduce RawHash2, which provides major improvements over RawHash, including more sensitive quantization and chaining algorithms, weighted mapping decisions, frequency filters to reduce ambiguous seed hits, minimizers for hash-based sketching, and support for the R10.4 flow cell version and POD5 and SLOW5 file formats. Compared to RawHash, RawHash2 provides better F1 accuracy (on average by 10.57% and up to 20.25%) and better throughput (on average by 4.0× and up to 9.9×) than RawHash.

RawHash2 is available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/RawHash. We also provide the scripts to fully reproduce our results on our GitHub page.