The firm plans to release an upgrade that will improve read lengths and throughput, with an eye toward being a player in the population sequencing market.
The Beijing-based firm said it will use the funding for research and development, to obtain additional intellectual property, and to pursue its strategic goals.
Researchers validated 95 percent of structural variants called by PacBio sequencing versus 43 percent with Oxford Nanopore, while Illumina missed thousands.
BGI has ordered 10 Sequel systems to meet long-read sequencing demand for bacterial, plant, and animal de novo, transcriptome, and epigenomics sequencing.
Mount Sinai researchers have developed a metagenomic method based on PacBio sequencing that uses methylation patterns to identify species and their associated plasmids.
Harvard Medical School's Seth Cassel and Cigall Kadoch argue in a Baltimore Sun op-ed that the recent TAILORx trial shows the potential of genomic-based medicine.
