Pacific Biosciences Sequel II System

Pacific Biosciences has launched it Sequel II single-molecule sequencing instrument. The new system runs SMRT chips that contain 8 million wells, or zero-mode waveguides (ZMWs). The system delivers around eight times greater data output than the firm's original Sequel instrument, which had 1 million ZMWs. According to the company, its HiFi reads, which make use of PacBio's circular consensus sequencing (CCS) protocol, have greater than 99.9 percent accuracy. As of last month, five early access customers had run 58 SMRT cells, obtaining average yields per SMRT cell for the CCS protocol of 250.4 gigabases and average per-cell yields for its continuous long read protocol of 67.4 gigabases.