By Julia Karow

Pacific Biosciences this week disclosed the first 10 early-access customers for its single-molecule real-time sequencer, which include genome centers and other academic institutes in North America as well as PacBio investor Monsanto.

The customers, who have ordered the $695,000 instrument at full list price, expect to receive their instruments this summer, with shipments expected to start in the second quarter, according to the company. The list price includes the main instrument console as well as a blade server for primary data analysis.

The first 10 early-access customers are Baylor College of Medicine, the Broad Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, the Genome Center at Washington University, Monsanto, the National Cancer Institute/SAIC-Frederick, the National Center for Genome Resources, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and Stanford University.

Notably absent from the list is Cornell University, where much of the basic technology for PacBio's platform was invented, but George Grills, director of operations of core facilities at Cornell's life sciences core laboratories center, told In Sequence that he hopes his institution will be among the second wave of early-access customers.

Later this year, PacBio plans additional early-access programs for customers in Europe and Asia, with the goal of making version 1 of the system, dubbed V1, widely available before the end of the year.

At the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference later this week, PacBio officials plan to reveal more details about the SMRT sequencer and its performance. In addition, scientific collaborators Elaine Mardis from the Genome Center at WashU and Joseph Puglisi from Stanford University School of Medicine are scheduled to present results from experiments conducted on PacBio's platform, including cancer genome sequencing and mutation detection and single-molecule analysis of protein translation.

The company's first commercial sequencer will process arrays with 80,000 zero-mode waveguides, tiny reaction chambers in which single polymerase enzymes synthesize DNA (see In Sequence 11/17/2009), while its prototype had 3,000 ZMWs per chip.

The average read length will be in the range of 1,000 to 1,200 bases, PacBio CEO Hugh Martin told In Sequence last week, and about 5 percent of reads will reach on the order of 3,000 to 5,000 bases in longer runs. Other performance specs, he said, "are still changing fairly dramatically as we continue to work on the enzyme in particular."

In the meantime, the company is working on a high-throughput "V2" implementation of its technology that will integrate sequencing reactions, optical detection, and signal processing in a single chip. That system is scheduled for release in 2014 (see other article, this issue).

Customer Expectations

While some of the early-access customers were collaborating with Pacific Biosciences prior to their instrument order, others were not. Several said the system appears to have distinct advantages over other sequencers, and expressed confidence about its performance and future improvements.

"We are extremely excited about the potential of this instrument to do things other technologies currently can't, such as producing very long reads, producing highly accurate reads by sequencing the same fragment several times in the same read, and generating data with very short run times," said Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the genome sequencing and analysis program at the Broad Institute.