PacBio

Third Generation Sequencing: Pacific Bioscience (PacBio)

The PacBio technology is very recent and hence it is still looking for a niche in the NGS market. This technology is based in Single Molecule Real Time sequencing (SMRT technology).

The main advantages of PacBio tecnology are:

This technology achieves read lenghts up to 23000 bp with a mean size of over 3000 bp.

This is a great advantage because increasing the coverage you can correct the errors while in the case of non random errors even with a huge increasing of the coverage the error rate can not be corrected in the regions prone to errors.

Because the library preparation has not any PCR step the DNA that is sequenced is the native DNA from the sample.

This is currently the only technology able to directly detect all the types of nucleotide modifications. A really high coverage is needed for this detection.

The main disadvantages are:

Pacbio offers two kinds of reads: Standard Long reads and CCS (Circular Consensus Sequencing) reads. CCS reads have a low error rate and a length sufficient to solve many long repeats in genomes. In many projects can be useful to join the possibilities that supply the long standard Pacbio reads with the accuracy of CCS reads.

In Era7 Bioinformatics we have experience in analyzing data from PacBio and in the integration with other technologies.

See here how we obtain almost finished bacterial genomes combining illumina short reads and PacBio regular and accurate CCS (Circular Consensus Sequence) reads:

AG7: closing genomes with pacbio

Pacific Biosciences has selected our BG7 method as a Partner product:

If you want to know more about what can PacBio technology do for your project, please contact us