These developments advance the ability of laboratories to identify and track infectious disease threats SARS-CoV-2 mutates rapidly but a new solution is now available for public health laboratories in the race against pathogen evolution—the HiFiViral SARS-CoV-2 Kit. Unlike amplicon-based assays that require periodic updates and subsequent revalidation to ensure all known SARS-CoV-2 variants are detectable, the new HiFiViral SARS-CoV-2 Kit gives researchers a more complete view of all mutations, ensuring that emerging variants can be captured for further study. This fully kitted solution brings trusted, accurate HiFi sequencing to SARS-CoV-2 variant detection. Compared with short read sequencing, HiFi sequencing…
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a sudden urgency to virus research and led many of us to dig more deeply into all the tools available for characterizing viral genomes, from RT-PCR to DNA sequencing. For all their outsized impact on human health, viruses have remarkably small and simple genomes, some just a few thousand bases in length, and most lacking any repetitive structures. With such tidy genomes, you may wonder, why would scientists want to sequence them with a long-read technology like PacBio HiFi reads? Quasispecies develop as variants are introduced to the viral genome through mutations. While it is…
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,…
PacBio highly accurate long reads, known as HiFi reads, offer all the benefits of long-read sequencing with accuracy comparable to short-read sequencing. To celebrate this new paradigm in sequencing technology, we hosted the 2019 HiFi for All SMRT Grant this past fall. This SMRT Grant was open to scientists worldwide and offered three winning projects each up to six SMRT Cells 8M and sequencing on the Sequel II System by our Certified Service Providers and co-sponsors. In response to our call for projects across the range of SMRT Sequencing applications, we received many truly compelling proposals, which made selecting…
What can one koala tell us about an endemic that threatens the survival of its species? A great deal, it turns out. While doing a deep dive into the genome of a wild female koala, a team of Australian scientists led by Matthew Hobbs and Andrew King of the Australian Museum Research Institute were able to unravel some of the complexity of the species-specific gammaretrovirus KoRV. The results, published recently in Nature, paint a picture of a rapidly evolving and diversifying virus, with implications for the long-term survival of the koala, as well as our understanding of retroviral-host species interactions.…