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Saturday, February 9, 2008

Pacific Biotech new sequencing technology

I have some breaking news. I doubt I'm the first to blog this, but I find it absolutely amazing, so I had to share.

Steve Turner from Pacific Biosciences (PacBio), just gave the final talk of the AGBT session, and it was damn impressive. They have a completely new method of doing sequencing that uses DNA polymerase as a sequencing engine. Most impressively, they've completed their proof of concept, and they presented data from it in the session.

The method is called Single Molecule Real Time (SMRT) sequencing. It's capable of producing 5000-25,000 base pair reads, at a rate of 10 bases/second. (They apparently have 25bps techniques in development, and expect to release when they have 50bps working!)

The machinery has zero moving part, and once everything is in place, they anticipate that they'll have a sequencing rate of greater than 100 Gb per hour! As they are proud to mention, that's about a full draft genome for a human being in 15 minutes, and at a cost of about $100. Holy crap!

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