Today we’re pleased to announce the release of Sequel System 6.0, including new software, consumable reagents and a new SMRT Cell.
Combined, the enhancements in the release improve the performance and affordability of Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing by providing individual long reads with greater than 99% accuracy, increasing the throughput up to 50 Gb per SMRT Cell, and delivering average read lengths up to 100,000 base pairs, depending on insert size. These improvements are expected to greatly enhance the accuracy and cost effectiveness of applications such as whole genome sequencing, human structural variant detection, targeted sequencing and RNA transcript isoform sequencing (Iso-Seq method).
For example:
- For amplicon and RNA sequencing projects, customers can generate up to 500,000 single-molecule reads with high fidelity (>99% single-molecule accuracy); and
- For whole genome sequencing projects, users can achieve up to 20 Gb per SMRT Cell with average read lengths up to 30 kb and high consensus accuracy (>99.999%).
Since SMRT Sequencing technology was first commercialized in 2011, we have increased the throughput per SMRT Cell by 2,000-fold. These ongoing throughput increases provide a significant cost savings for sequencing projects in the human, plant and animal markets, which allows researchers the opportunity to increase the size and scope of their projects.
“These enhancements represent the most significant improvement in terms of read length, throughput and accuracy that we have ever achieved in a single product release,” said Chief Executive Officer Michael Hunkapiller, Ph.D. “Customers can now enjoy unprecedented capabilities with a new paradigm in long-read sequencing — highly accurate single-molecule reads. Further, many users no longer need to trade off between read length and accuracy, because it is now possible to achieve Sanger-quality reads as long as 15 kb.”
Jonas Korlach, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, added: “Our latest Sequel System improvements open new opportunities for comprehensively mapping all human genetic variation — from SNVs to indels to SVs — in a single assay and pave the way for a new era of population-scale, high-quality human genome studies.”