From crop improvement to breeding healthier livestock to modeling human disease, scientists are using PacBio Sequencing to advance understanding of plant and animal genomes. In this article, we look at four examples of plant and animal genome references improved or made possible with SMRT Sequencing, including an early example of transcriptome sequencing of a chicken for improved annotation. These examples highlight insights gained with SMRT Sequencing that are missed with short-read data, such as complex regions or novel genes.
Scientists from WashU, Macrogen, and Mount Sinai are using long-read sequencing with single-molecule, next-generation genome mapping to create gold-quality de novo assemblies of human genomes. Unbiased de novo assembled genomes also highlight the substantial amount of structural variation unique to individuals and populations, which cannot be accessed by short-read technologies that use a reference-based re-sequencing approach.
At the University of Arizona, a leading genomics research facility benefits from decades of BAC- based sequencing expertise, original studies of crop genomes, and a unique emphasis on high molecular weight DNA.
Scientists at the USDA and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory know that better breeding of maize to feed a growing population will depend on an accurate reference assembly. They tackled the previously intractable crop with a combination of PacBio Sequencing and BioNano Genomics® genome maps, leading to the first-ever high-quality reference assembly.
Several new high-quality human genome assemblies produce ethnicity-specific reference sequences and show how scientists can use this genetic information to improve precision medicine studies in Asian sub- populations. These projects demonstrate how long- read SMRT Sequencing provides robust detection of polymorphic structural variants in clinically relevant gene coding regions and phases variants into haplotypes.
To understand the genetic factors underlying health and disease and to address hidden heritability, scientists require a more comprehensive view of all the variations in the human genome. Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing delivers the read lengths, uniform coverage, and accuracy needed for accessing the complete size spectrum of sequence variant types — from single nucleotides to complex structural variants. PacBio’s long single-molecule reads also provide direct variant phasing information across full-length genes and chromosome haplotype blocks. With SMRT Sequencing, scientists gain new insight into the genetic basis of health and disease.
At DuPont Pioneer, DNA sequencing is paramount for R&D to reveal the genetic basis for traits of interest in commercial crops such as maize, soybean, sorghum, sunflower, alfalfa, canola, wheat, rice, and others. They cannot afford to wait the years it has historically taken for high-quality reference genomes to be produced. Nor can they rely on a single reference to represent the genetic diversity in its germplasm.
Explore how high-quality genomes contribute to critical scientific endeavors.
The Agilent Femto Pulse system automated pulsed-field CE instrument is a fast, high-resolution benchtop capillary electrophoresis (CE) platform that utilizes pulsed-field electrophoresis to separate high molecular weight DNA fragments. This platform allows important DNA quality checkpoints to be completed in less than 1.5 hours with minimal sample input for de novo large genome sequencing projects and other PacBio applications leveraging multi-kilobase read lengths. The instrument can be used in place of gel-based pulsed-field electrophoresis (PFGE) systems to fully support generation of large-insert SMRTbell libraries with accurate sizing to 165 kb. Alternative DNA sizing instruments cannot accurately resolve large DNA fragments…
Explore how highly accurate long-read sequencing enabled sequencing the large and highly complex California redwood genome.
The sequence and assembly of human genomes using long-read sequencing technologies has revolutionized our understanding of structural variation and genome organization. We compared the accuracy, continuity, and gene annotation of genome assemblies generated from either high-fidelity (HiFi) or continuous long-read (CLR) datasets from the same complete hydatidiform mole human genome. We find that the HiFi sequence data assemble an additional 10% of duplicated regions and more accurately represent the structure of tandem repeats, as validated with orthogonal analyses. As a result, an additional 5 Mbp of pericentromeric sequences are recovered in the HiFi assembly, resulting in a 2.5-fold increase in…
The domestic pig (Sus scrofa) is important both as a food source and as a biomedical model with high anatomical and immunological similarity to humans. The draft reference genome (Sscrofa10.2) represented a purebred female pig from a commercial pork production breed (Duroc), and was established using older clone-based sequencing methods. The Sscrofa10.2 assembly was incomplete and unresolved redundancies, short range order and orientation errors and associated misassembled genes limited its utility. We present two highly contiguous chromosome-level genome assemblies created with more recent long read technologies and a whole genome shotgun strategy, one for the same Duroc female (Sscrofa11.1) and…
a-Gliadins are a major group of gluten proteins in wheat flour that contribute to the end-use properties for food processing and contain major immunogenic epitopes that can cause serious health-related issues including celiac disease (CD). a-Gliadins are also the youngest group of gluten proteins and are encoded by a large gene family. The majority of the gene family members evolved independently in the A, B, and D genomes of different wheat species after their separation from a common ancestral species. To gain insights into the origin and evolution of these complex genes, the genomic regions of the Gli-2 loci encoding…
This study reports the first haplotype phased reference quality genome assembly of textquoteleftMurrahtextquoteright an Indian breed of river buffalo. A mother-father-progeny trio was used for sequencing so that the individual haplotypes could be assembled in the progeny. Parental DNA samples were sequenced on the Illumina platform to generate a total of 274 Gb paired-end data. The progeny DNA sample was sequenced using PacBio long reads and 10x Genomics linked reads at 166x coverage along with 802Gb of optical mapping data. Trio binning based FALCON assembly of each haplotype was scaffolded with 10x Genomics reads and superscaffolded with BioNano Maps to…
Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) represent one of the most urgent threats to human health posed by antibiotic resistant bacteria. Enterobacter hormaechei and other members of the Enterobacter cloacae complex are the most commonly encountered Enterobacter spp. within clinical settings, responsible for numerous outbreaks and ultimately poorer patient outcomes. Here we applied three complementary whole genome sequencing (WGS) technologies to characterise a hospital cluster of blaIMP-4 carbapenemase-producing E. hormaechei.In response to a suspected CRE outbreak in 2015 within an Intensive Care Unit (ICU)/Burns Unit in a Brisbane tertiary referral hospital we used Illumina sequencing to determine that all outbreak isolates were sequence…