We were delighted to host an educational workshop at last month’s annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), where we had the opportunity to feature talks from two customers as well as an overview of SMRT Sequencing. If you couldn’t attend, check out the videos or read the highlights below. Emily Hatas, our director of business development, kicked things off with a look at how SMRT Sequencing has evolved over the years. Compared to the first instrument we offered, the Sequel II System represents a 100-fold improvement in read length and a 10,000-fold improvement in throughput. As…
University of Washington genome science technicians Melanie Sorensen, Katherine Munson, and Alexandra Lewis at the PacBio Sequencing Services. (Photo by Amy B. Wifert.) The National Human Genome Research Institute has awarded nearly $30 million for new sequencing and bioinformatics initiatives that aim to better represent the full range of human genetic diversity. An entirely new human reference genome — the “pangenome” — will be built from high-quality sequencing of 350 individuals from across the human population. Here at PacBio, we’re excited that highly accurate long-read WGS data from our Sequel II Systems will be an important component of this new…
Maryland Genomics leaders with the Sequel II System In this blog miniseries, we’re recapping presentations from early access users of the Sequel II System. Today, we summarize Luke Tallon’s report from Maryland Genomics, a PacBio Certified Service Provider. Like the other early access users, Maryland received 32 SMRT Cells for use in evaluating the new sequencing system. They tested them across a range of applications: continuous long-read (CLR) sequencing for humans, plants, insects, and bacteria; and HiFi mode, powered by circular consensus sequencing, for human, microbiome, and other samples. Tallon reports that each SMRT Cell 8M averaged about 92 Gb…
Kiran Garimella As we geared up for the launch of our new Sequel II System, we had the good fortune of working closely with several expert customers in an early access program. Recently, three of those customers reported on their experience with the new sequencing system in a webinar. In this blog series, we’ll be summarizing each speaker’s presentation, and the full recording is available to view. First up was Kiran Garimella (@KiranGarimella), a senior computational scientist at the Broad Institute who focused on the use of HiFi reads, which are long (>10 kb) and accurate (>99%) sequences produced by…