They spoke about omentum, chemosynthesis, chromothripsis, and… Tasmanian devils? This year’s virtual two-day SMRT Leiden Scientific Symposium and Informatics Developers Meeting was certainly educational. With the pandemic and increased difficulty in being able to connect in person, we wanted to provide a forum for young investigators, post docs, and faculty to come together and share their research experiences during these abnormal times. The result? 27 speakers—the majority of whom were young investigators—sharing data and discoveries, and their advice for early-career scientists. There was a great spectrum of presentations. The first keynote featured fun facts about Dominette (first Bos taurus…
With PacBio HiFi sequencing data now readily available for organisms of any size, many exciting results have been published featuring new de novo assembly methods optimized for highly accurate long reads. These methods have produced assemblies for a variety of organisms at quality levels never before thought possible — as measured by completeness, contiguity and correctness. We feel privileged to collaborate with the scientific community on the development of these tools. From Small to Tall When the USDA wanted to rapidly assemble the Asian Giant Hornet as part of its real-time invasive species response initiative, they turned to a tool…
To enable better understanding of biology, sequencing data must be accurate and complete. This is especially true when seeking out variants and determining their implications. Luckily, technical and software improvements for SMRT Sequencing are making it easier to efficiently generate genome assemblies with unparalleled accuracy. As presented in a webinar by PacBio Staff Scientist Sarah Kingan (@drsarahdoom) and GoogleAI Genomics Project Lead Andrew Carroll (@acarroll_ATG), HiFi reads enabled by circular consensus sequencing (CCS) on the new Sequel II System challenge the notion that sequencing technologies require a tradeoff between length and accuracy. Highly accurate long reads (HiFi reads) offer the…
Hundreds of SMRT scientists came together recently in Leiden to learn about the latest updates to PacBio technology and to showcase their data analysis tools. Extremely useful information was shared, and future collaborations were sparked. For those who weren’t able to jet to the Netherlands to attend, we’ve rounded up the top tools and tips presented at the European SMRT Informatics Developers Meeting. For an in-depth report on the event, check out this blog post by PacBio Principal Scientist Elizabeth Tseng. SMRT Link – Of course our own open-source SMRT analysis software suite will be top of the list. Updates…
Justin Zook A map of every individual’s genome will soon be possible, but how will we know if it is correct? Benchmarks are needed in order to check the performance of sequencing, and any genomes used for such a purpose should be comprehensive and well characterized. Enter the Genome in a Bottle Project (GIAB), a consortium of geneticists and bioinformaticians committed to the creation and sharing of high-quality reference genomes. Unlike other initiatives, such as the 1000 Genomes Project, that are seeking to sequence many representatives of different populations, GIAB is interested in sequencing just a few individuals, but deeply…
[Update April 30, 2018: This paper is now published in Nature Methods.] Sniffles and NGMLR, structural variant detection and alignment algorithms developed in the Schatz lab for long-read sequence data, are already familiar to many in the PacBio community. Now, a preprint is available so users can see how these open-source tools perform in a variety of conditions. “Accurate detection of complex structural variations using single molecule sequencing” comes from lead author Fritz Sedlazeck at Baylor College of Medicine, senior author Michael Schatz at Johns Hopkins University, and collaborators. The team notes that long-read sequencing has introduced a much more…
We’re looking forward to the International Plant and Animal Genome conference, taking place January 9-13 in San Diego. PAG features leading plant and animal scientists from around the world, and we’re continually impressed by their new discoveries and creative approaches to understanding large and complex genomes. This year PAG attendees will have a number of opportunities to learn more about how SMRT Sequencing reveals new information about even well-characterized plant and animal genomes. We’ll be exhibiting in booth #421 — and showing off our new Sequel System — so please stop by and tell us about your work. We’ll also…