SMRT Resources

In this Labroots webinar, Meredith Ashby, Director of Microbial Genomics at PacBio, describes the utility of highly accurate long-read sequencing, known as HiFi sequencing, to understand the SARs-CoV-2 viral genome. HiFi sequencing enables mutation phasing and rare variant detection to understand viral stability and mutation rates, as well as providing insights into viral population structure for monitoring viral evolution. Ashby also shares how HiFi sequencing can be used to explore the host immune response to COVID-19, specifically by providing full-length sequencing of the B cell repertoire, IGH locus and HLA genes.

Access additional COVID-19 Sequencing Tools and Resources.

In this webinar, Dr. Ashby gives attendees a brief update on PacBio’s metagenomics solutions on the Sequel II System. Then, Dr. Ma, University of Maryland School of Medicine, discusses her work using long read sequencing to identify high-resolution microbial biomarkers associated with leaky gut syndrome in premature infants. Finally, Dr. Weinstock, The Jackson Laboratory, talks about the potential of highly accurate long reads to enable strain-level resolution of the human gut microbiome by resolving intraspecies variation in multiple copies of the 16S gene.

Microbial Assembly is our latest pipeline, specifically designed to assemble bacterial genomes (between 2 and 10 Mb) and plasmids. This pipeline includes the implementation of a new, circular-aware read alignment tool (Raptor), among other algorithmic improvements, which will be covered in this webinar. The topics covered include, staged assembly of bacterial chromosomes and plasmids, implementation of Raptor, a circular-aware read aligner, himeric read detection, origin of replication orientation, troubleshooting and more.

The release of the PacBio Sequel II System in 2019 brought dramatic throughput improvements and protocols for producing a new data type, highly accurate long reads or HiFi reads. PacBio is the only sequencing technology to offer highly accurate long reads (HiFi reads) that provide Sanger-quality accuracy (>99%) with the read lengths needed for assembly of complex genomes. The long length and high accuracy of HiFi reads makes them the ideal starting point for many applications, and one area of major interest is genome assembly. HiFi assembly is faster, cheaper, more accurate, and easier to phase than standard long-read assembly. In this webcast, you will learn: The difference between long reads and HiFi reads; the strengths of HiFi read assembly for human, plant, animal, and insect genomes; step-by-step instruction on how to assemble HiFi reads using the publicly available FALCON package (https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pb-assembly)

In this PacBio User Group Meeting presentation, Chris Boles of Sage Science presents updates on the Sage System for getting the largest DNA fragments using the SageHLS.

In this PacBio User Group Meeting presentation, Garth Ehrlich of Drexel University College of Medicine shares his work on developing a microbiome assay that uses SMRT Sequencing to provide high-quality coverage of the 16S bacterial rRNA for species identification. The microbiome analysis pipeline, MCSMRT, takes advantage of PacBio circular consensus sequencing (CCS) technology and second-generation pathway analysis system for generating extremely high-fidelity sequences that provide the user with ultra-high-confidence species-level microbiome data.

In this PacBio User Group Meeting presentation, Zev Kronenberg of PacBio presents on using the combination of PacBio and Phase Genomics data and analysis tools to create highly contiguous genome assemblies.

In this PacBio User Group Meeting presentation, Bruce Kingham of the DNA Sequencing & Genotyping Center at the University of Delaware describes tips on using the FEMTO Pulse for large-insert libraries.

In this PacBio User Group Meeting presentation, Tina Graves-Lindsay of the McDonnell Genome Institute and the Genome Reference Consortium speaks about the importance of phasing human reference genomes. Her team is now working on its fifteenth human genome assembly — part of a major effort to improve genomic representation of ethnic diversity — with a pipeline that generates 60-fold PacBio coverage for a de novo assembly, followed by scaffolding with other technologies. They are also using FALCON-Unzip to separate haplotypes, leading to reference-grade diploid assemblies. This approach has already helped resolve errors seen in other genomes and even the gold-standard GRCh38 build of the human reference genome.

PacBio sequencing has been recognized as the gold-standard in microbial sequencing due to simultaneously providing long sequence reads (genome contiguity), high consensus accuracy (genome accuracy), minimal sequence bias (genome completeness), and methylation detection (bacterial epigenome). In his talk Jonas Korlach, highlights new advances and updates on applying PacBio sequencing in microbiology, including multiplexed microbial sequencing on the Sequel System and full-length bacterial RNA sequencing. In the second part of his talk, he covers how the generation of high-accuracy, single-molecule consensus reads, through a process called circular consensus sequencing – a capability unique to PacBio sequencing technology – can be leveraged for high-resolution insights into immune repertoires and other immunology relevant studies.

In this ASHG workshop presentation, Stuart Scott of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, presented on using the PacBio system for amplicon sequencing in pharmacogenomics and clinical genomics workflows. Accurate, phased amplicon sequence for the CYP2D6 gene, for example, has allowed his team to reclassify up to 20% of samples, providing data that’s critical for drug metabolism and dosing. In clinical genomics, Scott presented several case studies illustrating the utility of highly accurate, long-read sequencing for assessing copy number variants and for confirming a suspected medical diagnosis in rare disease patients. He noted that the latest Sequel System chemistry improved throughput and read length, as well as reducing error profile and increasing the capacity for multiplexing.

In this ASHG workshop presentation, Janet Song of Stanford School of Medicine shared research on resolving a tandem repeat array implicated in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These psychiatric diseases share a number of genomic risk variants, she noted, but scientists continue to search for a specific causal variant in the CACNA1C gene suggested by previous genome-wide association studies. SMRT Sequencing of this region in 16 individuals identified a series of 30-mer repeats, containing a total of about 50 variants. Analysis showed that 10 variants were linked to protective or risk haplotypes. Song aims to study the function of these variants in mouse models or human brain organoid models in the future.

In this ASHG workshop presentation , Jonas Korlach, CSO of PacBio, walked attendees through recent product updates and the coming technology roadmap. The Sequel System 6.0 release offered major improvements to accuracy, throughput, structural variant calling, and large-insert libraries, he said, showing examples of 35 kb libraries. Looking ahead, Korlach said that the V2 express library preparation product should be available early in 2019, with the new 8M SMRT Cell being introduced sometime later.

In this ASHG workshop presentation, Elizabeth Tseng of PacBio showed how the Iso-Seq method can be used to discover disease-associated alternative splicing. Because this approach to isoform sequencing yields accurate, full-length transcripts requiring no assembly, it’s ideal for disease studies that need a more comprehensive picture of alternative splicing activity. Tseng offered several published examples of how the Iso-Seq method has been used for everything from single-gene studies to whole-transcriptome studies, and also detailed how the latest Sequel System chemistry recovers more genes and produces more usable reads.

In this presentation, Justin Blethrow provides an overview of recent and upcoming developments across PacBio’s SMRT Sequencing product portfolio, and their implications for PacBio’s major applications. In presenting the product roadmap, he illustrates how key new products coming in 2019 will make SMRT Sequencing dramatically more affordable and easy to use, and how they will enable customers to routinely produce highly accurate, single-molecule long reads.

In this presentation, Elizabeth Tseng explains how PacBio’s full-length RNA Sequencing using the Iso-Seq method can characterize full-length transcripts without the need for computational transcript assembly. The Iso-Seq method is fully supported bioinformatically through PacBio’s SMRT Analysis software that outputs high-quality, full-length transcript sequences that can be used for genome annotation and novel gene discovery. Elizabeth shows that the highly accurate reads can be used to discover allelic-specific isoform expressions in transcriptome data.

In this presentation, Andrew Clark from Cornell University describes work from a collaboration with Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago and Rod Wing of the University of Arizona to look at heterochromatic regions with long simple satellite repeats in drosophila genomes. The group used PacBio sequencing to create new genome assemblies of 10 drosophila species, including de novo assemblies of two individual flies using as little as 26 ng of gDNA.

In this presentation, Sonja Vernes of the Max Plank Institute shares her work with the Bat1K project which aims to catalog the genetic diversity of all living bat species. She highlights the unique biology of bats, from their widely varying sizes to their capacity for healthy aging and disease resistance and provides recent findings from ongoing efforts to sequence and annotate the genomes of 21 phylogenetic families of bats.

This tutorial provides an overview of the Isoform Sequence (Iso-Seq) analysis application. The Iso-Seq application provides reads that span entire transcript isoforms, from the 5′ end to the 3′ poly A-tail. Generation of accurate, full-length transcript sequences greatly simplifies analysis by eliminating the need for transcript reconstruction to infer isoforms using error-prone assembly of short RNA-seq reads. This tutorial covers features of SMRT Link v6.0.0.

This tutorial provides an overview of the Structural Variant Calling application in SMRT Link and a live demo of how to launch an analysis in SMRT Link and interpret the results. This application identifies large (default: = 20 bp) insertions, deletions, inversions and translocations in a sample relative to a reference from.This tutorial covers features of SMRT Link v6.0.0.