In his talk from the AGBT 2015 PacBio workshop, Craig Venter detailed plans to sequence 1 million genomes and gather extensive phenotypic data to make sense of them. Included: generating 30 reference genomes to represent ethnogeographic diversity; the need for long-range continuity in sequencing; and truly predictive genomics.
Hélène Berges, managing director of the Plant Genomic Center at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in Toulouse, France, discusses how obtaining accurate and reliable sequence data is still challenging when targeting specific genomic regions. These issues are even more noticeable for complex plant genomes. To overcome these issues, Dr. Berges and her team have developed a strategy to reduce the genome complexity by using the large insert BAC libraries combined with next-generation sequencing technologies. She compares different technologies to sequence pools of BAC clones from several species (maize, wheat, strawberry, barley, sugarcane, and sunflower) known to be…
Swati Ranade from PacBio presents her AGBT poster demonstrating the use of SMRT Sequencing to characterize complex immune regions from human, macaque, and hummingbird. Included: a de novo assembly of complete KIR haplotypes, the MHC region, and MHC alleles.
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.
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.
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.
In this ASHG workshop presentation, Stuart Scott of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, presented on using the PacBio system for amplicon sequencing in pharmacogenomics and clinical genomics workflows. Accurate, phased amplicon sequence for the CYP2D6 gene, for example, has allowed his team to reclassify up to 20% of samples, providing data that’s critical for drug metabolism and dosing. In clinical genomics, Scott presented several case studies illustrating the utility of highly accurate, long-read sequencing for assessing copy number variants and for confirming a suspected medical diagnosis in rare disease patients. He noted that the latest Sequel System…
In this webinar, Lori Aro and Cheryl Heiner of PacBio describe how high-throughput amplicon sequencing using Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing and the Sequel System allows for the easy and cost-effective generation of high-fidelity, long reads from amplicons ranging in size from several hundred base pairs to 20 kb. Topics covered include the latest advances in SMRT Sequencing performance for detection of all variant types even in difficult to sequence regions of the genome, multiplexing options to increase throughput and improve efficiency, and examples of amplicon sequencing of clinically relevant targets.
In this presentation, Sonja Vernes of the Max Plank Institute shares her work with the Bat1K project which aims to catalog the genetic diversity of all living bat species. She highlights the unique biology of bats, from their widely varying sizes to their capacity for healthy aging and disease resistance and provides recent findings from ongoing efforts to sequence and annotate the genomes of 21 phylogenetic families of bats.
In this PacBio User Group Meeting lightning talk, Shawn Polson of the University of Delaware speaks about viral metagenomes, which are more challenging to distinguish than their bacterial counterparts because viruses have no 16S equivalent. By using SMRT Sequencing, his team generated higher-resolution data about viral genomes and aims to use this information as a guide to how these genomes function.
In this presentation, Emily Hatas of PacBio offers a look a how SMRT Sequencing has changed over the years as well as the most common applications in human genome analysis: high-throughput structural variant detection; comprehensive variant detection; and de novo assembly of reference genomes.
In this webinar, Dr. Ashby gives attendees a brief update on PacBio’s metagenomics solutions on the Sequel II System. Then, Dr. Ma, University of Maryland School of Medicine, discusses her work using long read sequencing to identify high-resolution microbial biomarkers associated with leaky gut syndrome in premature infants. Finally, Dr. Weinstock, The Jackson Laboratory, talks about the potential of highly accurate long reads to enable strain-level resolution of the human gut microbiome by resolving intraspecies variation in multiple copies of the 16S gene.
In this Labroots webinar, Meredith Ashby, Director of Microbial Genomics at PacBio, describes the utility of highly accurate long-read sequencing, known as HiFi sequencing, to understand the SARs-CoV-2 viral genome. HiFi sequencing enables mutation phasing and rare variant detection to understand viral stability and mutation rates, as well as providing insights into viral population structure for monitoring viral evolution. Ashby also shares how HiFi sequencing can be used to explore the host immune response to COVID-19, specifically by providing full-length sequencing of the B cell repertoire, IGH locus and HLA genes. Access additional COVID-19 Sequencing Tools and Resources.