Examining the fluorescence peaks in the trace data, we can determine the order of individual bases (nucleobase) in the DNA.
Phred was originally conceived in the early 1990s by Phil Green, then a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
LaDeana Hillier, Michael Wendl, David Ficenec, Tim Gleeson, Alan Blanchard, and Richard Mott also contributed to the codebase and algorithm.
Phred played a notable role in the Human Genome Project, where large amounts of sequence data were processed by automated scripts.
It was at the time the most widely used base-calling software program by both academic and commercial DNA sequencing laboratories because of its high base calling accuracy.