In order to understand the molecular mechanisms governing the outcomes of disease, health and survival, immunologists have to characterize exceptionally complex genomic regions, like major histocompatibility complex (MHC), killer cell immune receptors (KIR), and the B and T-cell immune repertoire. Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing delivers the long read lengths, uniform coverage and high accuracy necessary to comprehensively and confidently resolve these immune sub-genomic regions. The granularity of data generated by PacBio® reads provides new access to imputation-free characterization of genes and haplotypes for invaluable genomic insights to advance disease association and evolutionary research.
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 the types of human genomic variation and the diseases known to be caused by structural variants.
Explore how long-read sequencing enables solving of rare and mendelian diseases.
Studying microbial genomics and infectious disease? Learn how the PacBio Sequel II System can help advance your research, with first-hand perspectives from scientists who are investigating SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. In this webinar, Melissa Laird-Smith (Mt. Sinai School of Medicine) discusses her work evaluating the impact of host immune restriction in health and disease with high resolution HLA typing. She is joined by Corey Watson (University of Louisville School of Medicine) who talks about overcoming complexity to elucidate the role of IGH haplotype diversity in antibody-mediated immunity. Hosted by Meredith Ashby, Director of Microbial Genomics at PacBio. Access additional PacBio resources…
The central goal of medical genomics is to understand the inherited basis of sequence variation that underlies human physiology, evolution, and disease. Functional association studies currently ignore millions of bases that span each centromeric region and acrocentric short arm. These regions are enriched in long arrays of tandem repeats, or satellite DNAs, that are known to vary extensively in copy number and repeat structure in the human population. Satellite sequence variation in the human genome is often so large that it is detected cytogenetically, yet due to the lack of a reference assembly and informatics tools to measure this variability,…
The discovery of mutations associated with human genetic dis- ease is an exercise in comparative genomics (see Glossary). Although there are many different strategies and approaches, the central premise is that affected persons harbor a significant excess of pathogenic DNA variants as com- pared with a group of unaffected persons (controls) that is either clinically defined1 or established by surveying large swaths of the general population.2 The more exclu- sive the variant is to the disease, the greater its penetrance, the larger its effect size, and the more relevant it becomes to both disease diagnosis and future therapeutic investigation. The…
The incomplete identification of structural variants (SVs) from whole-genome sequencing data limits studies of human genetic diversity and disease association. Here, we apply a suite of long-read, short-read, strand-specific sequencing technologies, optical mapping, and variant discovery algorithms to comprehensively analyze three trios to define the full spectrum of human genetic variation in a haplotype-resolved manner. We identify 818,054 indel variants (
Melissa Laird Smith discussed how the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai uses long-read sequencing for translational research. She gave several examples of targeted sequencing projects run on the Sequel System including CYP2D6, phased mutations of GLA in Fabry’s disease, structural variation breakpoint validation in glioblastoma, and full-length immune profiling of TCR sequences.
Michael Lutz, from the Duke University Medical Center, discussed a recently published software tool that can now be used in a pipeline with SMRT Sequencing data to find structural variant biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and Lewy body dementia. His team is particularly interested in short sequence repeats and short tandem repeats, which have already been implicated in neurodegenerative disease.
Human MHC class I genes HLA-A, -B, -C, and class II genes HLA -DR, -DQ, and -DP play a critical role in the immune system as primary factors responsible for organ transplant rejection. Additionally, the HLA genes are important targets for clinical and drug sensitivity research because of their direct or linkage-based association with several diseases, including cancer, and autoimmune diseases. HLA genes are highly polymorphic, and their diversity originates from exonic combinations as well as recombination events. With full-length gene sequencing, a significant increase of new alleles in the HLA database is expected, stressing the need for high-resolution sequencing.…
In this Webinar, we will give an introduction to Pacific Biosciences’ single molecule, real-time (SMRT) sequencing. After showing how the system works, we will discuss the main features of the technology with an emphasis on the difference between systematic error and random error and how SMRT sequencing produces better consensus accuracy than other systems. Following this, we will discuss several ground-breaking discoveries in medical science that were made possible by the longs reads and high accuracy of SMRT Sequencing.
SMRT Sequencing is a DNA sequencing technology characterized by long read lengths and high consensus accuracy, regardless of the sequence complexity or GC content of the DNA sample. These characteristics can be harnessed to address medically relevant genes, mRNA transcripts, and other genomic features that are otherwise difficult or impossible to resolve. I will describe examples for such new clinical research in diverse areas, including full-length gene sequencing with allelic haplotype phasing, gene/pseudogene discrimination, sequencing extreme DNA contexts, high-resolution pharmacogenomics, biomarker discovery, structural variant resolution, full-length mRNA isoform cataloging, and direct methylation detection.
We show that linearizing and directly sequencing full-length fosmids simplifies the assembly problem such that it is possible to unambiguously assemble individual haplotypes for the highly repetitive 100-200 kb killer Ig-like receptor (KIR) gene loci of chromosome 19. A tiling of targeted fosmids can be used to clone extended lengths of genomic DNA, 100s of kb in length, but repeat complexity in regions of particular interest, such as the KIR locus, means that sequence assembly of pooled samples into complete haplotypes is difficult and in many cases impossible. The current maximum read length generated by SMRT Sequencing exceeds the length…
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…