NGS Expert Blog

The High-Throughput Sequencing map by James Hadfield (Cancer Research UK, Cambridge) gives us a very interesting overview about sequencing activities around the world. We ran a survey to find out if your favourite machines correspond with the platforms listed by James in his overview.

Here are the results: Your personal favourites are nearly a perfect match with platforms in the genome centers worldwide. Great match!

Dear all,

Here is my second summary from 4th NGS Congress at London Heathrow end of 2012. It will bring to you some (hopefully) interesting new facts about sequencing with PacBio RS - the second long read technology present in the actual markets and also the only system delivering reads even longer than 10,000 bp…

Kevin Corcoran, Senior Vice President at Pacific Biosciences held an interesting and very nice talk about the most recent developments for the PacBio RS system. He also showed some nice detailed road maps about future aims and plans. One important thing actual to be mentioned is the launch of the new “XL Chemistry” – while still “C2 Chemistry” may be used as well. The other very interesting story is about “Stage Start” a new feature enabling a parallel start of all sequencing detection similar to the well-known “hot start” technology for PCR. Such detection of sequences better will start from a defined position for most of the libraries than starting from somewhere in the middle. Last but not least, I’m very keen to learn how the future “Photo Protected DNA Polymerases” may further develop – an idea being really very, very next-next-generation…

First of all I can summarize that applying “XL Chemistry” looks really interesting and this being true also in terms of Eurofins MWG Operon de novo sequencing and assembly focus.  This new feature of the PacBio RS machine may also open some new doors to other types of applications, while in general the need for extrem high data coverages may be reduced in parallel.

Currently “C2 Chemistry” is on the machine and running a 90 min video may deliver you about 20-50,000 reads and data outputs of 30-50 Mb – of course higher yields may be possible for “ideal” DNA samples. The average read length is about 3,000 bp (!), while the 95% percentile is about 8,000bp. With the new ”XL Chemistry” we got an average yield of about 40,000 reads per SMRT cell with an average read length of about 4,000bp (+30%). Overall, we are very pleased with these first results, especially since we see some good potential to further increase data yields using the new software pipeline started in parallel (Hierarchical Genome Assembly Process and Quiver).

— See picture 1: —

It is also important to mention two different ways of “How-to-deal” with the XL Chemistry. 1) ”XL chemistry for Polymerase binding”, but “C2 chemistry for sequencing”. This allows for longer reads at the same quality (currently we still do have a single error rate of 10% to 20 %, average maybe 15%). 2) “XL chemistry for Polymerase binding” AND ”XL chemistry for sequencing”. Such one can yield even longer reads, but unfortunately the error rate will also increase by a few %. Therefore this method is being recommended especially for de novo assembly or finishing genomes.

— See picture 2: —

Finally one real “next-next-gen” highlight was the presentation of a development at Pacific Biosciences scoping with the idea to protect the polymerase enzyme from being killed by the energy of the laser. A picture shows how this should work in principle - by setting in place a laser-light protecting sun-blocker - this story was really fascinating for me and I hope to see in future more than the very promising first data results …

— See picture 3: —

So over all Pacific BioSciences keeps also moving very fast in year 2013 and it will be very nice to see and learn how all these additional improvements and new features may  improve the overall data results of this fascinating very long read technology offering today real single reads longer than 10,000 bp.

Cheers now and see you on our next BLOG,
Axel

Recently, we have reported on the Studies of the Broad Institute, showing that the PacBio RS system was able to outdo MiSeq sequencing regarding validation of SNP analysis. Now Pacific Biosciences have taken another important step to further improve their product.

Pacific Biosciences have now launched a new Sample Loading Device for the PacBio RS, called MagBead Station.  As  Michael Hunkapiller, Ph.D. President and Chief Executive Officer of Pacific Biosciences told in their press release, they expect that with the new device, customers will  “be able to generate 10 kilobase-sized libraries using as little as one microgram of sample, a five to 10-fold improvement from where we were just a few months ago”. Also, because the new process is more robust, they expect that sequencing results will have higher overall consistency, allowing to run experiments also on challenging samples.

First experiences of early-access-customers seem to underline these expections:

As Patrick Hurban of Expression Analysis told InSequence, the new loading device allowed them to recover sequences also for “difficult” samples: “we’re much more confident on a sample-by-sample basis that we will be able to get good sequence”, he said. Also, they could confirm that the amount of library that needs to be loaded is now significantly lower. The new loading process also seems to favor longer DNA fragments over shorter ones, excluding short contaminating DNA fragments. This results in a greater percentage of long reads in a run. Also, the loading process now seems to work as efficiently for the large insert libraries as it does for the smaller insert libraries.

With the new loading device, about 50-60 % of the ZMWs are now active after loading. This is a great improvement compared to 30-45 % of active ZMWs before the upgrade.

When PacBio started on the market, I was impressed by the sophisticated new technology. However, the results of the first projects were rather disappointing. The new loading device now seems to greatly improve the sample loading step. However, the high error rates still remain a challenge, with about 15% for the time being. Pac Bio will need to solve those issues if they want to be successful on the market in the long run. However, it seems that by and by, PacBio is overcoming  its “childhood diseases”.

Recently Investment Bank William Blair lowered top-line and bottom-line estimates for Illumina and Pacific Biosciences, citing government funding worries that could impact sales of both firms’ instruments <genomeweb>.

They lowered the forecast for shipping of 260 Illumina instruments in 2012 and 248 instruments in 2013. They also report a recent decrease of HiSeq consumables and lowered the forecast for consumable sales in 2012 by 3%. They predict also only a slight increase of 5% for consumable sales in 2013 over 2012.

If the shipping of 248 instruments increases the consumable sales only by 5%, than I have to wonder, how many of these instruments are really in use. If 248 instruments in average need 5% of the consumables this would mean, that at that time 4960 instruments are placed, which is far away from reality. The conclusion can only be that in average the instruments are used at less than 20% capacity. 

A huge amount of research money is used for buying instruments, instead of sourcing the service. As a consequence it takes long to fill a flow cell and the operators often have limited experience with sample preparation, data handling and analysis. This produces often pure data quality and is not helpful for high end research.

I am very curious about your opinion.

The E. coli EAHEC outbreak inGermany has been an opportunity to compare currently available sequencing technologies with respect to the data quality.

Regarding the N50 contig size and amount of contigs/scaffolds best assembly quality so far was achieved using the long read technologies in the market, Roche’s GS Junior sequencing and Pacific Biosciences’ PacBio RS sequencing. For further comparison I am therefore going to focus on data of both long read technologies. But first, please have a look at the sequencing layouts:

Sequencing layout PacBio RS (Source: Pacific Biosciences >):

Sequencing layout Roche GS Junior (Source: UK Health Protection Agency HPA >):

Comparison of the results:

The de novo assembly is comprised of 33 contigs with PacBio RS sequencing and 13 scaffolds with Roche GS Junior. The N50 contig size of the PacBio sequencing approach is 402 kbp and the N50 scaffold size of the Roche 454 sequencing approach is 968 kbp. Both de novo assemblies > with Illumina MiSeq and Ion Torrent PGM data so far revealed higher amount of contigs and considerably shorter N50 contig sizes (95 kbp and 50 kbp, respectively).

This data once again shows that de novo sequencing strictly needs long reads. The advantageous effect of the very long reads >  of PacBio for scaffolding (on average 2900 bp and 5% longer than 5100 bp) is balanced in the other approach by sequencing of the LPE library.

Important to mention is that the PacBio assembly is generated with reads from a not yet released chemistry (planned for quarter 4). In contrast Roche 454 assembly did not contain the long FLX+ chemistry reads that will become available for GS FLX by the end of the month. According to our experience a read length of 650 – 750 bp will have some additional positive effect on number of scaffold and N50 scaffold size.

Most striking for me is that as much as 56 flow cells were needed to generate the PacBio assembly with the high consensus accuracy > of 99.998 %. The standard library was sequenced with that high coverage in order to increase the number of very long reads and the circular consensus sequencing library was employed for further correction of errors derived of still low single read accuracy.