MinKNOW carries out several core tasks including: data acquisition; real-time analysis and feedback; data streaming whilst providing device control including selecting the run parameters; sample identification and tracking and ensuring that the platform chemistry is performing correctly to run the samples and local basecalling.
Local basecalling offers the user experimental setups for sequencing without any local infrastructure or where a stable internet connection is not available. Other compute setups using local infrastructure and basecallers are available, if required, and are detailed here.
MinKNOW produces .fast5 files using the HDF5 format to store data; they include raw data and basecalled files. Where the user requires fastq files, these can be easily extracted for use in customised analysis pipelines.