One of the more commonly misunderstood setting within PeakTrace™ is the force processing option. This option will allow you to force PeakTrace basecalling of files that would normally be rejected by PeakTrace for poor quality under normal circumstances (Figures 1 & 2).
Advantages
- Force processing may be useful when you wish to proceed with processing poor quality traces that are not able to basecalled by PeakTrace under standard basecalling settings.
- Forced processing may allow PeakTrace to rescue some usable data from an otherwise unusable trace (Figures 2 & 3).
Potential Pitfalls
While force processing can be useful to rescue some traces, there are risks with using it on all traces.
- Force processing may produce nonsensical or corrupted trace files. It is advised that you use this feature only as a last resort, and that you do so with additional caution.
- Force processing is not magic. It can not create a high quality trace from a failed reaction. In most cases, a poor quality trace indicates that the sample will need to be sequenced again under improved sequencing conditions.
- Force processing may result in PeakTrace crashing. While PeakTrace can automatically recover from a crash and restart, you may notice the program closing and restarting.
It is advised that force processing is only used if needed and not by default on all traces.