NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The European Patent Office has revoked a patent held by Pacific Biosciences, the company's rival Oxford Nanopore Technologies said today.

Oxford Nanopore had challenged the validity of the patent, EP3045542, titled "Methods for nucleic acid sequencing," which was granted in 2016.

The patent relates to a method for converting a double-stranded DNA fragment into a circle by adding hairpin linkers at the ends, so that both the sense and antisense strand can be sequenced, an approach PacBio employs for its so-called circular consensus sequencing (CCS).