Pacific Biosciences and Sage Science Announce Co-Marketing Partnership

Pacific Biosciences and Sage Science today announced a co-marketing partnership to provide customers of the PacBio RS II the ability to sequence even longer DNA fragments when performing Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT®) Sequencing.

"We have found that the BluePippin™ size selection platform is very useful for applications where long read lengths are important, such as de novogenome assembly," said Kevin Corcoran, Senior Vice President of Market Development at Pacific Biosciences. "Our studies have demonstrated that size selection with Sage's BluePippin platform is an easy addition to our customers' sample prep workflow that selects for 10 kb or larger fragments for sequencing on the PacBio RS II."

Based on PacBio's revolutionary SMRT Sequencing technology, the PacBio RS II can generate average read lengths of 5,000 base pairs, with the longest reads above 20,000 base pairs in length. The PacBio RS II System, including consumables and software, provides a simple, fast, end-to-end workflow for SMRT Sequencing in research areas including infectious disease and microbiology, agriculture, and complex genetic diseases with repeat expansions.

The BluePippin platform, part of the Pippin line of automated size-selection tools offered by Sage Science, uses pulsed-field power to take fractions of DNA from fragments ranging from 50 bases to 50 kilobases. Independent studies of size-selection methods for next-generation sequencing sample prep have repeatedly found that the Pippin platform offers unparalleled reproducibility, accuracy, and sample recovery. By eliminating low-molecular-weight templates from sequencing libraries, automated size selection allows users to load longer fragments and boost the average read length produced by sequencing.

"This is excellent validation of the tremendous utility BluePippin offers for libraries designed to generate extraordinarily long sequence reads," said Alex Vira, Director of Marketing for Sage Science. "We look forward to working with PacBio and its customers as they continue to deliver industry-leading read lengths and conduct countless studies that would be impossible with shorter-read technologies."

In data presented at the Advances in Genome Biology & Technology conference earlier this year, Pacific Biosciences scientists assessed three libraries (bacterial, fish and mammalian) generated with and without BluePippin size selection. They reported that N50 subread lengths increased by 90%, 110%, and 86%, respectively, in the libraries that were size selected with BluePippin compared to those that were not.