Explore the types of human genomic variation and the diseases known to be caused by structural variants.
Structural variation accounts for much of the variation among human genomes. Structural variants of all types are known to cause Mendelian disease and contribute to complex disease. Learn how long-read sequencing is enabling detection of the full spectrum of structural variants to advance the study of human disease, evolution and genetic diversity.
Explore how long-read sequencing enables solving of rare and mendelian diseases.
To bring personalized medicine to all patients, cancer researchers need more reliable and comprehensive views of somatic variants of all sizes that drive cancer biology.
With highly accurate long reads (HiFi reads) from the Sequel II System, powered by Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing technology, you can comprehensively detect variants in a human genome. HiFi reads provide high precision and recall for single nucleotide variants (SNVs), indels, structural variants (SVs), and copy number variants (CNVs), including in difficult-to-map repetitive regions.
With the Sequel II System powered by Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing technology and SMRT Link v8.0, you can affordably and effectively detect structural variants (SVs), copy number variants, and large indels ranging in size from tens to thousands of base pairs. PacBio long-read whole genome sequencing comprehensively resolves variants in an individual with high precision and recall. For population genetics and pedigree studies, joint calling powers rapid discovery of common variants within a sample cohort.
Andrew Carroll, Director of Science at DNAnexus, presents how to greatly improve the accuracy of SV-calling by using long-read PacBio sequencing and fast and easy-to-run cloud-optimized apps like PBHoney, Parliament, and Sniffles.
In this video, PacBio scientists present ongoing improvements to the Integrative Genomics Viewer (IGV) and demonstrate how multiple new features improve visualization support for PacBio long-read sequencing data. The video describes these recent updates which include; quick consensus accuracy mode to hide random single-molecule errors, direct phasing of haplotypes using long-read evidence, and visual annotation of insertions and deletions relative to the reference with enumeration of gap size for individual reads. These new features are available now in the development version of IGV, which can be found at http://software.broadinstitute.org/software/igv/download_snapshot. The Sequel sequencing data used in this demonstration is also publicly…
PacBio bioinformatician Aaron Wenger presents this ASHG 2016 poster demonstrating human structural variation detection at varying coverage levels with SMRT Sequencing on the Sequel System. Results were compared to truth sets for well-characterized genomes. Results indicate that even low coverage of SMRT Sequencing makes it possible to detect hundreds of SVs that are missed in high-coverage short-read sequencing data.
In this ASHG 2017 presentation, Han Brunner of Radboud University Medical Center presented research using SMRT Sequencing to detect structural variants to uncover the genetic causes of intellectual disability. He shared that long-read sequencing enabled detection of 25,000 structural variants per genome. Brunner presented data from patient trios to identify de novo structural variant candidates and ongoing validation work to determine the causative mutations of intellectual disability.
In this ASHG 2017 presentation, Charles Lee of The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine presented work from the Human Genome Structural Variation Consortium. He shared data from efforts to utilize multiple platforms for the comprehensive discovery of structural variations—including insertions, deletions, inversions and mobile element insertions—in individual genomes. By combining various technologies, this research identified 7 times more structural variation per person than was previously known to exist.
In this video, Aaron Wenger, a research scientist at PacBio, describes the use of long-read SMRT Sequencing to detect structural variants in the human genome. He shares that structural variations – such as insertions and deletions – impact human traits, cause disease, and differentiate humans from other species. Wenger highlights the use of SMRT Sequencing and structural variant calling software tools in a collaboration with Stanford University which identified a disease-causing genetic mutation.
Explore human genetic variation and learn how SMRT Sequencing uncovers the full spectrum of structural variation to advance understanding of genetic disease and broaden our knowledge of human diversity.
Structural variants (SVs, differences >50 base pairs) account for most of the base pairs that differ between two human genomes, and are known to cause over 1,000 genetic disorders including ALS, schizophrenia, and hereditary cancer. Yet, SVs remain overlooked in human genetic research studies due to the limited power of short-read sequencing methods (exome and whole genome sequencing) to resolve large variants, which often involve repetitive DNA. Recent advances in long-read sequencing have made it possible to detect the over 20,000 SVs that are now known to exist in a human genome. Corresponding advances in long-read SV calling algorithms have…
Most of the basepairs that differ between two human genomes are in intermediate-sized structural variants (50 bp to 5 kb), which are too small to detect with array CGH but too large to reliably discover with short-read NGS. PacBio Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing fills this technology gap. SMRT Sequencing detects tens of thousands of structural variants in a human genome, approximately five times the sensitivity of short-read NGS. To discover variants using SMRT Sequencing, we have developed pbsv, which is available in version 5 of the PacBio SMRT Link software suite. The pbsv algorithm applies a sequence of stages:…