PacBio 2013 User Group Meeting Presentation Slides: Lisbeth Guethlein from Stanford University School of Medicine looked at highly repetitive and variable immune regions of the orangutan genome. Guethlein reported that “PacBio managed to accomplish in a week what I have been working on for a couple years” (with Sanger sequencing), and the results were concordant. “Long story short, I was a happy customer.”
As a cost-effective alternative to whole genome human sequencing, targeted sequencing of specific regions, such as exomes or panels of relevant genes, has become increasingly common. These methods typically include direct PCR amplification of the genomic DNA of interest, or the capture of these targets via probe-based hybridization. Commonly, these approaches are designed to amplify or capture exonic regions and thereby result in amplicons or fragments that are a few hundred base pairs in length, a length that is well-addressed with short-read sequencing technologies. These approaches typically provide very good coverage and can identify SNPs in the targeted region, but…
Whole genome sequencing can provide comprehensive information important for determining the biochemical and genetic nature of all elements inside a genome. The high-quality genome references produced from past genome projects and advances in short-read sequencing technologies have enabled quick and cheap analysis for simple variants. However even with the focus on genome-wide resequencing for SNPs, the heritability of more than 50% of human diseases remains elusive. For non-human organisms, high-contiguity references are deficient, limiting the analysis of genomic features. The long and unbiased reads from single molecule, real-time (SMRT) Sequencing and new de novo assembly approaches have demonstrated the ability…
A longstanding goal of genomic analysis is the identification of causal genetic factors contributing to disease. While the common disease/common variant hypothesis has been tested in many genome-wide association studies, few advancements in identifying causal variation have been realized, and instead recent findings point away from common variants towards aggregate rare variants as causal. A challenge is obtaining complete phased genomic sequences over extended genomic regions from sufficient numbers of cases and controls to identify all potential variation causal of a disease. To address this, we modified methods for targeted DNA isolation using fosmid technology and single-molecule, long-sequence-read generaton that…
The long reads, random error, and unbiased sampling of SMRT Sequencing enables high quality, de novo assembly of the human genome. PacBio long reads are capable of resolving genomic variations at all size scales, including SNPs, insertions, deletions, inversions, translocations, and repeat expansions, all of which are important in understanding the genetic basis for human disease and difficult to access via other technologies. In demonstration of this, we report a new high-quality, diploid aware de novo assembly of Craig Venter’s well-studied genome.
MHC class I and II genes are critically monitored by high-resolution sequencing for organ transplant decisions due to their role in GVHD. Their direct or linkage-based causal association, have increased their prominence as targets for drug sensitivity, autoimmune, cancer and infectious disease research. Monitoring HLA genes can however be tricky due to their highly polymorphic nature. Allele-level resolution is thus strongly preferred. However, most studies were historically focused on peptide binding domains of the HLA genes, due to technological challenges. As a result knowledge about the functional role of polymorphisms outside of exons 2 and 3 of HLA genes was…
The complex immune regions of the genome, including MHC and KIR, contain large copy number variants (CNVs), a high density of genes, hyper-polymorphic gene alleles, and conserved extended haplotypes (CEH) with enormous linkage disequilibrium (LDs). This level of complexity and inherent biases of short-read sequencing make it challenging for extracting immune region haplotype information from reference-reliant, shotgun sequencing and GWAS methods. As NGS based genome and exome sequencing and SNP arrays have become a routine for population studies, numerous efforts are being made for developing software to extract and or impute the immune gene information from these datasets. Despite these…
The long reads, random error, and unbiased sampling of SMRT Sequencing enables high quality, de novo assembly of the human genome. PacBio long reads are capable of resolving genomic variations at all size scales, including SNPs, insertions, deletions, inversions, translocations, and repeat expansions, all of which are both important in understanding the genetic basis for human disease, and difficult to access via other technologies. In demonstration of this, we report a new high-quality, diploid-aware de novo assembly of Craig Venter’s well-studied genome.
Target enrichment capture methods allow scientists to rapidly interrogate important genomic regions of interest for variant discovery, including SNPs, gene isoforms, and structural variation. Custom targeted sequencing panels are important for characterizing heterogeneous, complex diseases and uncovering the genetic basis of inherited traits with more uniform coverage when compared to PCR-based strategies. With the increasing availability of high-quality reference genomes, customized gene panels are readily designed with high specificity to capture genomic regions of interest, thus enabling scientists to expand their research scope from a single individual to larger cohort studies or population-wide investigations. Coupled with PacBio® long-read sequencing, these…
In recent years, human genomic research has focused on comparing short-read data sets to a single human reference genome. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that significant structural variations present in individual human genomes are missed or ignored by this approach. Additionally, remapping short-read data limits the phasing of variation among individual chromosomes. This reduces the newly sequenced genome to a table of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with little to no information as to the co-linearity (phasing) of these variants, resulting in a “mosaic” reference representing neither of the parental chromosomes. The variation between the homologous chromosomes is lost in…
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC), or human leukocyte antigen (HLA) in humans, is a highly diverse gene family with a key role in immune response to disease; and has been implicated in auto-immune disease, cancer, infectious disease susceptibility, and vaccine response. It has clinical importance in the field of solid organ and bone marrow transplantation, where donors and recipient matching of HLA types is key to transplanted organ outcomes. The Sanger based typing (SBT) methods currently used in clinical practice do not capture the full diversity across this region, and require specific reference sequences to deconvolute ambiguity in HLA types.…
Dan Geraghty explains that while there have been decades’ worth of studies associating the genetics of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), and the highly polymorphic HLA class 1 and 2 genes, we still haven’t found the key mutations for a variety of different autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and others. Enormous amounts of linkage disequilibrium in these regions are one factor, as is getting information in phase, so larger stretches of sequence are needed. Recently Geraghty has begun using SMRT Technology with hopes of drilling down to the causal genetics.
One of the popular questions on the Mendelspod program is how those doing sequencing decide between the quality of PacBio’s long reads and the cheaper short read technology, such as that of Illumina or Thermo Fisher. Steve Marsh, the Director of Bioinformatics at the Anthony Nolan Research Institute in London, provides the most clear and dramatic answer yet: use the PacBio system exclusively. Established in 1974 by the mother of a boy with a rare blood disease, the Anthony Nolan Institute is a world leader in blood crossmatching and donor/patient registries. Steve and his team at the Institute have dramatically…
In this ASHG 2016 poster video, Martin Pollard from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge describes an ambitious project to better represent natural variation in the complex MHC region by sequencing the locus in thousands of people from various populations in Africa. A pilot project in five populations has already revealed a lot of diversity in the region, which is important for human disease, vaccine response, and organ transplantation. Pollard says SMRT Sequencing is the only technology that can deliver the full-length haplotypes necessary to identify complete variation in this highly polymorphic complex. Plus: plans to…
Melissa Laird Smith from Icahn Institute at Mt. Sinai reviews her work studying the genetic background of immune response by characterizing population diversity at the immunoglobulin heavy chain locus. Webinar registration required.