Blog
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…
February 12, 2020
NARMS Scientists Track Antibiotic Resistance in Foodborne Bacteria Using SMRT Sequencing
We hear a lot about the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance in human health, but it turns out this is just the most visible place it appears as it moves…
February 10, 2020
PacBio Sequencing Contributes to New Japanese Reference Genome
People of Japanese descent just moved a little closer toward the promise of precision medicine thanks to a population-specific reference genome based on the de novo genome assembly of three…
February 4, 2020
‘Pathway for Discovery’: SMRT Grant Winner Aims to Address the Mysteries of Autism with HiFi Sequencing
We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2019 Human Genetics SMRT Grant: Tychele Turner, an assistant professor who recently joined the Washington University in St. Louis School of…
January 30, 2020
At PAG 2020, HiFi Data ‘Transformational’ for Advancing Plant and Animal Research
What better way to start the year than a gathering of thousands of stellar scientists? We were excited, once again, to attend the Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) Conference in…
January 27, 2020
When Snakes Strike: SMRT Sequencing Reveals Hidden “Venom-ome”
Snake milking, horse blood harvesting and brewing — antivenom production is still more medieval art than modern science. But a new high-quality snake genome may finally pull it into the…
January 23, 2020
Project to Rapidly Sequence Maize Pangenome Delivers Publicly Available Resource
Maize researchers have been rejoicing over a New Year’s gift delivered by a group of 33 scientists: A 26-line “pangenome” reference collection. The multi-institutional consortium of researchers used the Sequel…
January 13, 2020
Direct Phased Genome Assembly Using Nighthawk on HiFi Reads
By Zev Kronenberg, Senior Engineer of Bioinformatics at PacBio Since the introduction of HiFi reads the community has embraced these long and highly accurate reads for human genome assembly…
January 8, 2020
SMRT Grant Winner: Hunting for Answers in Spinocerebellar Ataxia
A hearty congratulations to Cleo van Diemen at the University Medical Center Groningen for winning the 2019 Neuroscience SMRT Grant! Van Diemen’s impressive proposal involves using PacBio long-read sequencing to…
January 3, 2020
Novel Workflow Produces Fully Phased Human Genome Assemblies Without Trio Sequencing
A new preprint from lead authors David Porubsky and Peter Ebert, senior authors Evan Eichler and Tobias Marschall (@tobiasmarschal), and collaborators reports a method for generating fully phased, de novo…