Get SMRT: Pacific Biosciences Unveils Software Suite with Commercial Launch

Third-generation sequencing company Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) began commercial shipment of its PacBio RS single-molecule sequencer this week. The instrument has been in beta testing at 11 institutions in North America and elsewhere for the past year. A notable success was the recent sequencing and identification of the cholera strain sweeping Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

In a briefing with Bio-IT World, PacBio staffers Kevin Corcoran, Jon Sorenson and Edwin Hauw previewed the new suite of software tools on the RS sequencer. The SMRT (single molecule/real time) Analysis software suite features web-based software, an analysis pipeline framework, and algorithms for sequence alignment and de novo assembly...

...The SMRT Portal is an open-source, browser-based application that supports standard sequence format.  That means that next-generation sequencing (NGS) data from other platforms, such as Illumina, Life Technologies, Ion Torrent, and Roche, can be integrated with PacBio data. Users can align reads to a reference sequence or assemble reads de novo...