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.
Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing on the Sequel II System enables easy and affordable generation of high-quality de novo assemblies. With megabase size contig N50s, accuracies >99.99%, and phased haplotypes, you can do more biology – capturing undetected SNVs, fully intact genes, and regulatory elements embedded in complex regions.
Many scientists are using PacBio Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing to explore the genomes and transcriptomes of a wide variety of marine species and ecosystems. These studies are already adding to our understanding of how marine species adapt and evolve, contributing to conservation efforts, and informing how we can optimize food production through efficient aquaculture.
By 2050, there will be 9 billion people on the planet. What will they eat? This is the question that led Rod Wing, Director of the Arizona Genomics Institute, into the field of plant genomics. What has been accomplished so far in the mission to come up with some super green crops? And how does Rod see anti-GMO sentiment and the recent trend toward gluten free diets factoring in? After answering these questions, he dives into a discussion on which sequencing instruments he has used for plant work. Unsurprisingly, Rod prefers the PacBio long reads even though the cost is…
PacBio Sequencing is characterized by very long sequence reads (averaging > 10,000 bases), lack of GC-bias, and high consensus accuracy. These features have allowed the method to provide a new gold standard in de novo genome assemblies, producing highly contiguous (contig N50 > 1 Mb) and accurate (> QV 50) genome assemblies. We will briefly describe the technology and then highlight the full workflow, from sample preparation through sequencing to data analysis, on examples of insect genome assemblies, and illustrate the difference these high-quality genomes represent with regard to biological insights, compared to fragmented draft assemblies generated by short-read sequencing.
At PAG 2017, Rod Wing presented five new, high-quality rice genome assemblies developed with SMRT Sequencing, including one that has eight complete chromosomes including centromeres. He also offered an early look at data generated with the Sequel System for a new assembly underway. This work is done with the goal of developing rice varieties that will be better suited to feeding a rapidly growing global population.
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.
In a poster presented at AGBT 2017, Fritz Sedlazeck from Johns Hopkins University describes the comparison of genome assemblies produced using long-read PacBio sequencing and short-read sequencing with 10x Genomics scaffolding. An alignment reveals regions missed by the short-read assembly, including repeats, exons, and even whole genes.
In this webinar, Emily Hatas of PacBio shares information about the applications and benefits of SMRT Sequencing in plant and animal biology, agriculture, and industrial research fields. This session contains an overview of several applications: whole-genome sequencing for de novo assembly; transcript isoform sequencing (Iso-Seq) method for genome annotation; targeted sequencing solutions; and metagenomics and microbial interactions. High-level workflows and best practices are discussed for key applications.
In this PAG 2018 presentation, Marty Badgett of PacBio, shares updates on PacBio products and performance. He highlights high-quality genome assembles for Arabidopsis, rice, and maize, the SMRTbell Express Template Prep Kit, SMRT Analysis updates, and the Iso-Seq method for RNA sequencing.
This webinar, presented by Nisha Pillai, provides an overview of amplicon sequencing to target specific regions of a genome using PacBio Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing. This session provides an overview of bioinformatics approaches for PacBio amplicon analysis including circular consensus sequencing and long amplicon analysis.
In this presentation, Justin Blethrow provides an overview of recent and upcoming developments across PacBio’s SMRT Sequencing product portfolio, and their implications for PacBio’s major applications. In presenting the product roadmap, he illustrates how key new products coming in 2019 will make SMRT Sequencing dramatically more affordable and easy to use, and how they will enable customers to routinely produce highly accurate, single-molecule long reads.
To start Day 1 of the PacBio User Group Meeting, Jonas Korlach, PacBio CSO, provides an update on the latest releases and performance metrics for the Sequel II System. The longest reads generated on this system with the SMRT Cell 8M now go beyond 175,000 bases, while maintaining extremely high accuracy. HiFi mode, for example, uses circular consensus sequencing to achieve accuracy of Q40 or even Q50.
In this PacBio User Group Meeting presentation, PacBio scientist Kristin Mars speaks about recent updates, such as the single-day library prep that’s now possible with the Iso-Seq Express workflow. She also notes that one SMRT Cell 8M is sufficient for most Iso-Seq experiments for whole transcriptome sequencing at an affordable price.
In a push to develop insect-based food sources for people, Brenda Oppert from the USDA has been sequencing bug genomes with PacBio technology. Long reads are essential because of the highly repetitive sequences and large genomes. On the Sequel II System, a single SMRT Cell is sufficient to generate 350-fold coverage and produce a high-quality assembly for some of the insects she’s studying.