Our BluePippin instrument got a little celebrity treatment at AGBT today. Several PacBio users who spoke during the plenary and evening sessions noted that BluePippin is an essential part of their SMRT Sequencing pipeline.
We were especially flattered to get attention during a talk from Dick McCombie of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He presented genome sequencing projects for rice and two strains of yeast, all of which were completed using BluePippin size selection to remove low molecular weight content. Read length from sizing and PacBio sequencing was so long, McCombie said, that in the yeast projects it really was only limited by chromosome length. Preparing 7 Kb libraries with BluePippin enabled the team to focus assembly efforts on reads of 10 Kb and longer, which still generated abundant coverage and led to single-contig chromosomes in many cases.
Later in the day, David Wheeler from the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine reported that his team uses BluePippin size selection with PacBio long reads to help select high molecular weight content — a particularly important feature for the structural rearrangements he is looking to find. Not long afterward, Sean McGrath from the Genome Institute at Washington University noted in his presentation on using SMRT Sequencing for isoform characterization that size fractionation with BluePippin or the SageELF would be an important future direction for his own work.
If you haven’t stopped by our suite yet, please say hello. We’re in lanai #281 and would love to tell you more about why BluePippin is getting all these great shout-outs from the podium!