Pretty cool to see the success of PacBio (Pacific Biosciences) technology for long-read sequencing. PacBio is one of the few successful sequencing technologies using nature’s canonical high-fidelity DNA reading tool (DNA polymerase). Other successful sequencing tech uses approaches that are (ingeniously) different from how DNA is read in a living cell.

PacBio circular consensus sequencing (used here) is a clever way of performing extremely accurate single-molecule reads: the target linear DNA is joined into a circle, which is read over and over again, enabling high accuracy of each base by consensus