In this AGBT 2017 talk, PacBio CSO Jonas Korlach provided a technology roadmap for the Sequel System, including plans the continue performance and throughput increases through early 2019. Per SMRT Cell throughput of the Sequel System is expected to double this year and again next year. Together with a new higher-capacity SMRT Cell expected to be released by the end of 2018, these improvements result in a ~30-fold increase or ~150 Gb / SMRT Cell allowing a real $1000 real de novo human genome assembly. Also discussed: Additional application protocol improvements, new chemistry and software updates, and a look at…
At AGBT 2017, the Broad Institute’s Daniel Neafsey reported a large collaborative effort to sequence the mosquito that carries Zika virus. The team is using long-read PacBio sequencing to produce a high-quality genome assembly, which Neafsey expects will replace the 10-year-old Sanger assembly for Aedes aegypti. The new assembly reduces the number of contigs by at least 10-fold, boosts the contig N50 to nearly 2 Mb, and features more complete gene content.
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:…
In this ASHG 2017 presentation, Jonas Korlach, the CSO of PacBio shared updates on three applications featuring SMRT Sequencing on the Sequel System, highlighting structural variant detection, targeted sequencing and the Iso-Seq method of RNA sequencing. He provided details on structural variant calling using pbsv to call insertions and deletions and compared PacBio variant calling with other technologies. Korlach described how targeted sequencing can be used to interrogate repeat expansions, detect and phase minor variants and can access medically relevant but previously inaccessible gene targets. He presented research featuring the Iso-Seq method that identified isoforms, corrected previous isoform annotations and…
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.