The Earlham Institute was one of the first labs to adopt the PacBio Sequel II System. Karim Gharbi, Head of Genomics Pipelines, discusses how SMRT Sequencing and HiFi reads have increased throughput and reduced costs for genome, transcriptome, and metagenomics projects.
Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing offers affordable characterization of complete microbial genomes and populations. With this technology, scientists have the ability to simultaneously detail base modifications and mobile elements, quantify low-level variants, and achieve strain-level resolution within communities.
Industrial microbiologists rely on comprehensive genomic information to identify and develop complex biological products. Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing delivers a more complete view of individual organisms and microbial communities, fueling research for modern pharmaceutical discovery, environmental remediation, chemical commodity production, and agriculture products.
At the University of Maryland’s Genomics Resource Center, SMRT Sequencing has become an integral tool for generating complete microbial genomes, improving plant and animal genome assemblies, and exploring human genome variation.
With PacBio long-read sequencing, scientists are making exciting new discoveries about the microbes that live around and within us. From viruses to bacteria to fungi, SMRT Sequencing is shedding light on how these organisms function and evolve.
The bacteria living on and within us can impact health, disease, and even our behavior, but there is still much to learn about the breadth of their effects. The torrent of new discoveries unleashed by high-throughput sequencing has captured the imagination of scientists and the public alike. Scientists at Second Genome are hoping to apply these insights to improve human health, leveraging their bioinformatics expertise to mine bacterial communities for potential therapeutics. Recently they teamed up with scientists at PacBio to explore how long-read sequencing might supplement their short-read-based pipeline for gene discovery, using an environmental sample as a test…
Many scientists are using PacBio Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing to explore the genomes and transcriptomes of a wide variety of marine species and ecosystems. These studies are already adding to our understanding of how marine species adapt and evolve, contributing to conservation efforts, and informing how we can optimize food production through efficient aquaculture.
Highly accurate long reads – HiFi reads – with single-molecule resolution make Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing ideal for full-length 16S rRNA sequencing, shotgun metagenomic profiling, and metagenome assembly.
Long-read sequencing technologies substantially improved assemblies of many isolate bacterial genomes as compared to fragmented assemblies produced with short-read technologies. However, assembling complex metagenomic datasets remains a challenge even for the state-of-the-art long-read assemblers. To address this gap, we present the metaFlye assembler and demonstrate that it generates highly contiguous and accurate metagenome assemblies. In contrast to short-read metagenomics assemblers that typically fail to reconstruct full-length 16S RNA genes, metaFlye captures many 16S RNA genes within long contigs, thus providing new opportunities for analyzing the microbial “dark matter of life”. We also demonstrate that long-read metagenome assemblers significantly improve full-length…
Chemical defense against predators is widespread in natural ecosystems. Occasionally, taxonomically distant organisms share the same defense chemical. Here, we describe an unusual tripartite marine symbiosis, in which an intracellular bacterial symbiont (“Candidatus Endobryopsis kahalalidefaciens”) uses a diverse array of biosynthetic enzymes to convert simple substrates into a library of complex molecules (the kahalalides) for chemical defense of the host, the alga Bryopsis sp., against predation. The kahalalides are subsequently hijacked by a third partner, the herbivorous mollusk Elysia rufescens, and employed similarly for defense. “Ca E. kahalalidefaciens” has lost many essential traits for free living and acts as a…
Accurate genome assembly is hampered by repetitive regions. Although long single molecule sequencing reads are better able to resolve genomic repeats than short-read data, most long-read assembly algorithms do not provide the repeat characterization necessary for producing optimal assemblies. Here, we present Flye, a long-read assembly algorithm that generates arbitrary paths in an unknown repeat graph, called disjointigs, and constructs an accurate repeat graph from these error-riddled disjointigs. We benchmark Flye against five state-of-the-art assemblers and show that it generates better or comparable assemblies, while being an order of magnitude faster. Flye nearly doubled the contiguity of the human genome…