Pacific Biosciences of California is now shipping commercial Pacbio RS systems, which it expects to expand the applications of DNA sequencing in cancer research, pathogen detection and agriculture.
These commercial shipments are following a successful early-access programme conducted with 11 sequencing customers around the world.
The Pacbio RS is a DNA sequencing system that is claimed to incorporate novel, single-molecule sequencing techniques and advanced analytics to reveal biology in real time.
The system delivers sequence readlengths of more than a thousand DNA bases on average.
And unlike 'second generation' systems on the market, which typically take more than one week to deliver results, the Pacbio RS allows customers to obtain results in less than a day.
The first commercial units are being shipped to sites in North America and Europe that include biotechnology companies, commercial service providers, governmental institutions and academic laboratories.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute was one of the eleven early access sites for the Pacbio RS that was recently upgraded to the commercial hardware specifications.
'We intend to use the Pacbio RS to improve pathogen de novo assemblies, to increase the coverage of sequence information from organisms like the malaria parasite or Mycobacterium tuberculosis at the extremes of AT/GC representation, and in the future, to explore epigenetics via direct detection of methylated sites,' said Harold Swerdlow, head of sequencing technology at the institute.
