Blog
April 28, 2020
Delivering New Insights into Cancer Research: SMRT Sequencing Case Studies
Will the next big cancer breakthrough be in immunotherapy? Therapeutic modification of the tumor microenvironment or microbiome? Or early detection and screening? Whatever the result, long-read sequencing technology can play…
April 22, 2020
Sequencing 101: why are long reads important for studying viral genomes?
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a sudden urgency to virus research and led many of us to dig more deeply into all the tools available for characterizing viral genomes, from…
April 15, 2020
Go Big or Go Home — Tackling a Giant Genome
California redwoods: Not only are they giants in height and age (up to 379 feet high, 29 feet round, and thousands of years old), but the famous towering trees are…
April 13, 2020
How Long-read Sequencing Can Help Researchers Address Pressing Questions in COVID-19 Pandemic
Herculean efforts are being made by scientists around the world to respond quickly to the COVID-19 crisis in a race to understand the virus causing the pandemic and develop diagnostics,…
April 8, 2020
In Battle Against COVID-19 Pandemic, Scientists Turn to PacBio Sequencing
Our team is proud to announce that PacBio has been working closely with customers to help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists in commercial, academic, and government research…
April 7, 2020
Sequencing 101: video introduction to PacBio sequencing and the Sequel II system
We’re pleased to release a short video describing PacBio sequencing and our latest platform, the Sequel II system. If you’ve ever wondered how Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) sequencing works, what…
April 1, 2020
HiCanu for HiFi Reads Produces First Assembly of Human Segmental Duplications and Centromeres
UPDATE — September 1, 2020: This paper is now published in Genome Research. ORIGINAL POST — April 1, 2020 In a new preprint, scientists from the National Human Genome Research…
March 23, 2020
AGBT 2020 Highlights: Reference-Grade Assemblies, Iso-Seq Data, and More
It was a pleasure to attend the annual Advances in Genome Biology & Technology meeting in sunny Marco Island, Fla., last month. The conference has a long history of supporting…
March 18, 2020
Prokaryotic Methylation Detection on the Sequel II System
Since the first PacBio instrument was released in 2011, methylation detection has been one of the advantages of SMRT Sequencing. The kinetics of nucleotide incorporation change as the DNA polymerase…
March 16, 2020
A Menagerie of New Genomes Released by International Ensembl Project
Meerkats, yaks, geese, and lots of flies — oh my! A full menagerie of new and updated animal genomes has been released by the Ensembl project. The Ensembl 99…
March 11, 2020
SMRT Grant Winners: Three Scientists Selected to Use HiFi Sequencing to Tackle Genomic Challenges
PacBio highly accurate long reads, known as HiFi reads, offer all the benefits of long-read sequencing with accuracy comparable to short-read sequencing. To celebrate this new paradigm in sequencing…
March 5, 2020
Beyond contiguity — assessing the quality of genome assemblies with the 3 Cs
With high-throughput long-read sequencing, it is now affordable and routine to produce a de novo genome assembly for microbes, plants and animals. The quality of a reference genome impacts biological…
March 4, 2020
Nice to See You, Telomere: Scientists Use SMRT Sequencing for Previously Intractable Regions of the Human Genome
Telomeres and centromeres have long vexed genomic scientists. In the early days of genome sequencing, many researchers took it for granted that assembling these highly repetitive regions was essentially impossible….
February 28, 2020
A Rare Opportunity to Help Tackle Daughter’s Rare Disease
The rarest day on the calendar is February 29th — which makes it the perfect time to celebrate Rare Disease Day. On this day, we join millions of people around…
February 14, 2020
A Rose is a Rose: HiFi Reads Enable Sequencing of Complex Tetraploid Species
The genome of the rose is almost as complicated as its connotations when given as a gift on Valentine’s Day or other special occasions. Although relatively small in size, at…