The research community is as diverse as the scientific questions they study. For mid-sized labs, core facilities, and emerging biotech companies, choosing the right laboratory technology is a balancing act between reliability, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and performance. For such labs, sequencing technology needs to be functionally advanced, yet compact and accessible.
To facilitate this, PacBio scientists created the VegaTM HiFi system, a precise, affordable, and rapid long-read sequencing platform. “One of the challenges was, how to bring all the complex engineering and requirements to do single molecule sequencing into a very small footprint. We needed to make sure that we could properly miniaturize and maintain all of the quality and breakthrough information that we can provide with HiFi,” said Mark Van Oene, chief operating officer at PacBio. “This is essentially half the size of what the predecessor was. It’s half as expensive and it’s twice as powerful.”
David Miller, PacBio’s vice president of product marketing is excited about the Vega system. “It brings our well-known, highly accurate, long read HiFi technology to a whole new set of customers and enables them to access it in a way that they never could before,” Miller said.
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PacBio’s Vega™ system is a desktop-sized, simple, accessible, and cost-effective HiFi sequencing system with the power to keep up with emerging needs.
PacBio
Among those to reap the benefits of Vega are Judith Meyers, assistant director at the University of Michigan’s Advanced Genomics Core, and Zachary Freeman, director of the University of Michigan’s Transgenic Animal Model Core. “It fills a niche that we were missing at the core, which is very highly accurate long reads,” Meyers said. Freeman added that the quality scores are comparable to many of the short read methods. “You get the benefit of these longer reads with this very high accuracy, which allows us to really look at very complex changes in the genome and understand them,” Freeman said. “We do a lot of CRISPR-based sequencing, where we’re trying to do targeted sequencing over an enriched area. Using the Vega, we can do this in a very scalable way that makes it cost effective for our customers to understand the changes in genome edits that they’re trying analyze,” Freeman added.
