In this ASHG 2020 PacBio Workshop Jonas Korlach, CSO, shares how the new PacBio Sequel IIe System makes highly accurate long-read sequencing easy and affordable so?all scientists can gain comprehensive views of human genomes and transcriptomes. He goes on to provide updates on the applications including human WGS for variant detection, de novo genome assembly, single-cell full-length RNA sequencing, and targeted sequencing using PCR and No-Amp methods.
Stanford University developmental biologist Lucy Shapiro discusses a collaborative research effort with PacBio sequencing that revealed previously unknown aspects of how chromosome methylation regulates cell cycle progression in Caulobacter. The ability to detect DNA modifications through SMRT Sequencing proved critical in determining methylation states throughout the cell cycle.
In this lecture Professor Carlos Bustamante from Stanford University describes the importance of expanding population genetic studies beyond a Northern European ancestry based approach into multi and trans-ethnic study designs.
Mike Snyder from Stanford University has published recent papers in Nature Biotechnology and PNAS using SMRT Sequencing for transcriptome analysis and demonstrated that long reads enable full coverage of RNA molecules. He discusses that work and his views on long-read sequencing and transcriptomics in this podcast.
At the PacBio ASHG workshop, Hagen Tilgner describes how he used long-read sequencing with Iso-Seq method to generate the first personal transcriptomes for three individuals. From these three family members, he and his collaborators were able to unambigously assign allele-specific RNA haplotypes, including HLA haplotypes, and demonstrated Mendelian inheritance of RNA molecules.
Alex Dainis, a graduate student in Euan Ashley’s lab at Stanford University, presents her ASHG 2015 poster on haplotyping for genes linked to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Using the Iso-Seq method with SMRT Sequencing, she sequenced full transcripts of two genes of interest, generating data on 150 different isoforms. Rare variants, which could not be found with other technologies, were associated with haplotypes.
Alex Dainis from Stanford University says the Sequel System from PacBio will offer more power to multiplex samples more efficiently.
Euan Ashley speaks about precision medicine and said clinical-grade analysis has been limited by complex regions in the human genome. His key theme,”Precision medicine needs to be accurate medicine,” was illustrated with several examples where short-read sequencing or traditional clinical sequencing methods failed to be accurate. Also included: targeted RNA sequencing and gene phasing with long-read sequencing.
Euan Ashley from Stanford University started with the premise that while current efforts in the field of genomics medicine address 30% of patient cases, there’s a need for new approaches to make sense of the remaining 70%. Toward that end, he said that accurately calling structural variants is a major need. In one translational research example, Ashley said that SMRT Sequencing with the Sequel System allowed his team to identify six potentially causative genes in an individual with complex and varied symptoms; one gene was associated with Carney syndrome, which was a match for the person’s physiology and was later…
Jonas Korlach spoke about recent SMRT Sequencing updates, such as latest Sequel System chemistry release (1.2.1) and updates to the Integrative Genomics Viewer that’s now update optimized for PacBio data. He presented the recent data release of structural variation detected in the NA12878 genome, including many more insertions and deletions than short-read-based technologies were able to find.
Tremendous flexibility is maintained in the human proteome via alternative splicing, and cancer genomes often subvert this flexibility to promote survival. Identification and annotation of cancer-specific mRNA isoforms is critical to understanding how mutations in the genome affect the biology of cancer cells. While microarrays and other NGS-based methods have become useful for studying transcriptomes, these technologies yield short, fragmented transcripts that remain a challenge for accurate, complete reconstruction of splice variants. The Iso-Seq method developed at PacBio offers the only solution for direct sequencing of full-length, single-molecule cDNA sequences needed to discover biomarkers for early detection and cancer stratification,…
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.
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.
Structural variants (SVs, differences >50 base pairs) account for most of the base pairs that differ between two human genomes, and are known to cause over 1,000 genetic disorders including ALS, schizophrenia, and hereditary cancer. Yet, SVs remain overlooked in human genetic research studies due to the limited power of short-read sequencing methods (exome and whole genome sequencing) to resolve large variants, which often involve repetitive DNA. Recent advances in long-read sequencing have made it possible to detect the over 20,000 SVs that are now known to exist in a human genome. Corresponding advances in long-read SV calling algorithms have…
In this ASHG workshop presentation, Janet Song of Stanford School of Medicine shared research on resolving a tandem repeat array implicated in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These psychiatric diseases share a number of genomic risk variants, she noted, but scientists continue to search for a specific causal variant in the CACNA1C gene suggested by previous genome-wide association studies. SMRT Sequencing of this region in 16 individuals identified a series of 30-mer repeats, containing a total of about 50 variants. Analysis showed that 10 variants were linked to protective or risk haplotypes. Song aims to study the function of these variants…