Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (NASDAQ: PACB), provider of Single Molecule Real Time (SMRT ®) sequencing products, today announced it has released a major upgrade to its PacBio ® RS system, referred to as “C2”, including new chemistry, enhanced SMRT Cells and upgraded software, which together provide customers with significant performance increases for DNA sequencing. The company and numerous customers will discuss their progress with the platform through a total of 50 presentations and posters at the 2012 Advances in Genome Biology & Technology (AGBT) meeting this week in Marco Island, Fla. The PacBio RS is a revolutionary DNA sequencing system that reveals new biological insights by incorporating novel, single molecule sequencing techniques, advanced analytics, and long read lengths. Compared with the C1 versions launched with the system in April 2011, the PacBio C2 chemistry and software provide approximately:
- 2x increase in average read length;
- 3-4x improvement in mappable data per SMRT Cell;
- 50-80% reduction in input DNA required; and
- Consensus accuracy of Q50 (99.999%) at substantially lower coverage.