Jul 1, 2016 | Focus Of The Month
PACBio’s SMRT is a parallelized single molecule DNA sequencing method with sequencing-by- synthesis technology based on real-time imaging of fluorescently tagged nucleotides as they are synthesized along individual DNA template molecules. As the technology uses a DNA polymerase to drive the reaction and because it images single molecules, there is no degradation of signal over time.
The power of SMRT sequencing data lies both in its long read lengths and in the random nature of the error process .It is true that individual reads contain a higher number of errors: approximately 11% to 14% or Q12 to Q15, compared with Q30 to Q35 from Illumina and other technologies. However, given sufficient depth (8x or more, say), SMRT sequencing provides a highly accurate statistically averaged consensus perspective of the genome, as it is highly unlikely that the same error will be randomly observed multiple times.