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December 3, 2013  |  Microbial sequencing methods

PacBio Partners with Sanger Institute and Public Health England to Finish 3,000 Bacterial Genomes

Sanger’s Genome Campus

We are pleased to announce a new collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Public Health England to complete the sequences of 3,000 bacterial genome strains from PHE’s National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC). Sequencing will be performed on the PacBio® RS II DNA Sequencing System at the Sanger Institute. The three-year project could double the number of finished microbial genomes in GenBank.

The NCTC is one of the world’s premier collections for bacterial strains, but most bacteria in NCTC currently have no genome references. Combining reference genomes with the wealth of historical and biological information existing for these strains will generate a data set of enormous value for basic and clinical microbiology.

“This is a crucial set of reference bacteria, and it is critical to have fully finished genomes for them,” said Dr. Julian Parkhill, head of Pathogen Genomics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “The collection of 3,000 additional finished genomes, including plasmids and other genomic elements, and epigenomes, will be a wonderful resource for the entire microbiology community.”

Our CSO Jonas Korlach commented: “SMRT® Sequencing has become the gold standard for finishing microbial genomes and we are delighted to be part of this NCTC project to add a wealth of information to the public databases for these important microbes.”

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