If only we could track COVID-19 like we track the weather, with satellites and weather stations placed around the globe monitoring and sounding the alarm about potential storms, floods, droughts and other severe weather events. A global pathogen surveillance network would save countless lives, and lessons learned from the current coronavirus pandemic could help make it possible, PacBio Chief Scientific Officer Jonas Korlach told Mendelspod host Theral Timpson (@theraltweet). Korlach joined Brian Caveney, President and Chief Medical Officer of Labcorp, in a recent podcast to discuss SARS-CoV-2 viral surveillance and the trajectory of COVID research, vaccination and treatment. PacBio has…
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, vaccines, and therapeutics. But many research questions remain. How can long-read SMRT Sequencing technology help fill the gaps? PacBio microbiology expert Meredith Ashby highlighted several opportunities to support coronavirus research in a recent webinar as part of a day-long virtual conference hosted by LabRoots. Sequencing the viral genome Understanding the basic biology of the virus is essential, and the more detailed our investigation, the better. Highly accurate, long-read sequencing…
Image by Miroslava Chrienova from Pixabay 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 teams are using highly accurate SMRT Sequencing data to resolve variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that exist within one individual or across a population of patients, which is critical to developing and maintaining effective diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics. Many of these efforts are powered by our HiFi reads, which are both long and highly accurate. Such reads are well-suited for applications like viral sequencing,…
How do pernicious pathogens like Clostridioides difficile spread through hospitals and persist so tenaciously in the human gut, leading to about half a million infections and 30,000 deaths each year? It’s a mystery scientists have been anxious to solve, and they’ve invested countless hours of research into the bacteria’s physiology, genetics and genomic evolution. A team from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City has uncovered an important new clue by studying an overlooked aspect of C. difficile’s biology: Epigenetics. Using PacBio SMRT Sequencing and comparative epigenomics, Pedro H. Oliveira (@pholive81), Gang Fang (@iamfanggang), and colleagues mapped and…
Harm van Bakel When MRSA hits your hospital, what do you do? If you’re located in Europe or other places where infection rates are still relatively low, you can take a seek-and-destroy approach, isolating an affected patient and working out in concentric circles to identify contacts and potential transmissions. If you’re in New York City, however, the strategy is not so simple. Hospital-associated infections with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus are endemic in the Big Apple, and this has required a fresh approach to treat and prevent the costly bacterial menace. At Mount Sinai Hospital, the strategy now involves SMRT Sequencing. Established…