An Update on Long-Read Sequencing Stocks

Spending an afternoon on the Oxford campus is a special experience that opens your eyes to the possibilities of youth. As you sip your shandy and watch the students scurry by, you start to realize that while some academics dedicate their entire lives to benefiting humanity, others of us can barely manage to keep our substance abuse problems in check. We fall into the latter category, so we prefer to let other people do the heavy lifting and then leverage their hard work to save time. Fortunately, the bright folks at the University of Cambridge have put together a primer on long-read sequencing which we’ll distill down to get you up to speed quickly.

Short-Read vs. Long-Read Sequencing

All those machines sold by Illumina (ILMN), the dominant leader in next-generation sequencing (NGS), utilize short-read sequencing (SRS) which is what it says on the tin.

Illumina sequencing primarily sequences small fragments of DNA, producing read lengths of 50-300 base pairs (bp) which are then assembled into a whole genome sequence using bioinformatics pipelines and reference genomes.

University of Cambridge, PHG Foundation

The downside is that it’s time and labor-intensive to start piecing everything together with questionable accuracy in certain situations. Then, there’s long-read sequencing (LRS) which examines a single molecule of DNA to produce reads of 10,000-30,000 base pairs in length. LRS can sequence