Building a research program takes a career’s worth of scientific work. Writing the grant proposal to fund the next step asks for a different kind of effort entirely, and for a sequencing instrument or sequencing-heavy project, that effort can start to consume as much time as the research itself. A strong proposal of this type requires a full technology justification backed by peer-reviewed evidence, direct competitive comparisons against alternative platforms, a budget that reflects a realistic understanding of the work involved, and documentation thorough enough to cover feasibility as rigorously as the science.
To take on as much of that assembly work as possible, we built a comprehensive grant support resource, a collection of the essential papers and benchmarking data organized by research area, a technology justification framework, and guidance for budget and feasibility documentation, including a free one-on-one grant consultation with a PacBio expert.
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The sections below cover the parts of a sequencing grant that tend to take the most time, and how to approach each one efficiently.
Finding the essential papers for your application
A good proposal grounds its technology choice in peer-reviewed literature demonstrating performance validation, and that the approach has worked in scientific contexts as close to your own as possible. Which papers belong in a rare disease application centered on tandem repeat expansions is a different question from which papers belong in a cancer genomics proposal, a plant genome assembly, or a microbiome study. Identifying the right validation papers for your specific research project requires knowing the literature well enough to cite it selectively, and that takes time even for researchers deep in the field.
Our library of 200+ curated reference summaries is organized by application area across human genomics, rare disease, cancer, plant and animal genomes, microbial community sequencing, full-length RNA sequencing, and more, so the shortlisting work is already done. A personalized set of those essential references, matched to your research focus, is part of what the resource delivers.
Making the competitive case
A strong proposal doesn’t just make the case for HiFi sequencing but also anticipates the question of ‘why not’ an alternative technology. The most persuasive evidence for this is direct benchmarking data comparing performance across technologies in the contexts most relevant to your work.
For example, on accuracy, HiFi reads achieve Q33 (99.95%) compared to ONT’s typical Q20, a difference that becomes consequential for indel calling, where ONT’s systematic errors limit reliability. Against Illumina, the contrast is sharpest for structural variant recall. Published benchmarks against GIAB truth sets show HiFi at 96% SV recall compared to 62.4% for Illumina, a gap that reflects read length rather than a tunable parameter. For genome assembly and pangenome construction, HiFi’s long reads enable contiguous assemblies across the complex and repetitive regions that short reads cannot resolve.
And the figures below show where the platforms actually diverge on variant calling across depths. A PacBio analysis shows that SNV recall is broadly comparable at matched depths, but the gap opens sharply on indels and SVs, and HiFi maintains that advantage even at lower coverage. At 20x, HiFi achieves more than 99% of its 30x F1 for SNVs and SVs and more than 98% for indels, while identifying approximately 0.87 Mb more true positive variation than ONT at 60x and approximately 8.4 Mb more than Illumina at 35x. Harvey et al. (2023) also shows that the indel separation is consistent across every coverage depth tested, with HiFi at low depth reaching recall levels that ONT and ultra-long ONT cannot approach even at substantially higher sequencing depth.
The competitive reference summaries in the resource collect the essential benchmarking literature across these comparisons and organize it by application area, so the citations you need are findable without a separate search.
Getting the budget right for your grant
Getting the budget right for a sequencing proposal means correctly estimating instrument needs, consumables costs, run counts, and sample preparation, as well as knowing which platform makes sense at your projected scale. Underestimating any of these in ways that a knowledgeable reviewer will notice is the kind of issue that can come up late and be difficult to address.
The grant support resource includes a comparison of the Revio and Vega platforms that helps establish which system fits your throughput requirements. Translating current instrument pricing into a defensible line-item budget at your specific project scope and run volume is exactly the kind of question the free one-on-one consultation with a PacBio expert is designed to help with.
What a complete feasibility section needs to establish
For instrument grants and sequencing-heavy project grants alike, a thorough feasibility section demonstrates that the infrastructure exists or will exist to support the proposed work and that the workflow has been validated in comparable settings. These sections require pulling together technology documentation, platform specifications, and workflow validation literature that most applicants don’t have at the ready. We’ve organized that supporting documentation within the resource so it can be adapted to your institution and proposal rather than gathered from scratch.
Building a proposal that holds up to scrutiny
A grant reviewer evaluating a sequencing proposal is reading for whether the scientific rationale, the technology evidence, the budget, and the feasibility documentation all tell a coherent story about a project that is sound, justified, and executable. Gaps in any one section create questions that the others can’t answer. Covering the essential literature, the benchmarking case, the budget, and the feasibility documentation thoroughly, with materials specific to your application area, is what gives a proposal the depth it needs to hold up across the full review.
To get your grant support resources and schedule a 1:1 free project consultation, answer a few short questions about the grant you’re applying for and your project.