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News: Illumina to Acquire Pacific Biosciences

In the news:

Illumina to Acquire Pacific Biosciences for Approximately $1.2 Billion, Broadening Access to Long-Read Sequencing and Accelerating Scientific Discovery

It is interesting to consider what this means - is short read sequencing on the downtrend? Or is a business move to limit PacBio's potential and keep selling short read sequencers.

I will make a note to say that SAM/BAM files are inappropriate representation for long reads - even Heng Li's minimap2 invents a new format paf to deal with long read alignments.

pacbio illumina

I don't know what it means, ultimately; however, I am noticing a trend of Illumina never actually inventing anything by itself and instead buying ideas / products from independent groups / businesses. They never even invented the short read technology behind SBS in the first place.

inventors don't make for good business people, take the MinION as an example. Great technology - cool concept, inefficiently run as a business and still languishing.

In time Illumina will be knocking on that door too :-)

I wonder when Roche will step in back to the sequencer market ...

It may mainly be some IP held by PacBio that is attractive. It also gives them an option in the 30-50 kb read range where there was none before.

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