The Prospects

With news of the launch of Pacific Biosciences' SMRT machine, Keith Robison at Omics! Omics! takes a minute to blog about the company. There are few challenges that the company faces, he says, and the main one is meeting demand for machines. "The system has three salient positive characteristics which can sell machines: extremely long reads, relatively fast sample-to-sequence time, and the ability to directly detect modified or non-canonical bases. Then it has two huge handicaps: the pricetag and the low (~80%) single-pass accuracy (the monster size and weight aren't a plus, but if you really need a machine you'll create the space!)," Robison writes. One way that Robison says PacBio can help itself out is by publishing more papers to show the variety of projects the machine can be useful for.