Pacific Biosciences of California Inc (PACB)

[Paulieme]

Welcome to the $1,000 genome
Posted by Biome on 25th February 2014
"What’s possible now

With Roche shutting down their 454 sequencing business and Life Technologies largely pushing their Ion Torrent systems over the SOLiD platform, there are really only 3 technologies currently available: Ion Torrent, Pacific Biosciences and Illumina.

Ion Proton, the higher throughput of Life Technologies’ Ion Torrent machines, currently runs the PI chip, capable of producing 60 to 80 million 200bp reads in a 4 hour run, a total output of 10Gb. The PII chip, having been scheduled for release early in 2013 has now been pushed back to mid-2014. The PII chip will apparently be capable of producing 300 million 100bp reads, resulting in a 30Gb output.

Pacific Biosciences’ RS II machine, the only single-molecule sequencer on the market, does not really compete with Illumina or Ion in terms of throughput; its P5-C3 chemistry produces only 375Mb of sequence per run. The real strength of the RS II is its long reads: the average read being 8.5Kb, with the longest being in excess of 30Kb. Recently published read correction strategies remove many of the errors, and now the SMRT technology of Pacific Biosciences (or ‘PacBio’) seems the weapon of choice for finishing genomes or de novo sequencing of new genomes."

The future for Illumina’s competitors

It will be really interesting to see how Life Technologies responds to Illumina’s latest developments. Their key advantage is speed, with the Ion Torrent platforms carrying out the sequencing component in hours rather than days. However, the throughput and cost-per-base do not match current Illumina platforms, never mind the new ones. To remain a viable business, Life Technologies, and its Ion Torrent platforms, must respond.

Pacific Biosciences’ SMRT technology has evolved significantly too and has become an essential tool for those wishing to close genomes, or sequence de novo new genomes. Intriguingly, Roche, a global health-care company, announced an agreement with Pacific Biosciences to develop DNA sequencing products for clinical diagnostics. This is not a space that Pacific Biosciences have been in up until now, and it is difficult to see how their RS II system can compete with Illumina and Ion Torrent in the clinic. Because of this, rumors of a new (benchtop?) PacBio machine abound on social media.
(more on link)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/biome/welcome-to-the-1000-genome/