Pacific Biosciences of California Inc. provider of the PacBio RS High Resolution Genetic Analyzer, announced the launch of the MagBead Station for the PacBio RS, a product enhancement that delivers more high-value long reads, enables use of small sample amounts, and makes sample preparation more robust.
The MagBead Station upgrade and associated MagBead kit enable sequencing of longer templates, especially for samples that are biologically difficult to prepare. This results in more 4-10 kilobase long reads captured with each SMRT Cell. Because the process is more robust, sequencing results have higher overall consistency. It also significantly reduces the amount of the input sample required, which can be critical for experiments when there is a small amount of useable DNA available from a sample.
The MagBead Station greatly reduces any adapter-dimer that may be present in some libraries and there are clearly benefits in terms of how much library is consumed during loading a sequencing run. Compared to diffusion loading, approximately one-tenth the library is needed to load each SMRT Cell, allowing much deeper sequence coverage from a single library preparation.
With this latest enhancement, users will be able to generate 10 kilobase-size libraries using as little as one microgram of sample, a five to 10-fold improvement from a few months ago. The MagBead Station will make a substantial difference in customers’ ability to run experiments on challenging samples because it will reduce the impact of the variability in sample prep while reducing the amount of sample needed to perform highly accurate sequencing.
Filed Under: Drug Discovery
