Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. announced the Revio long-read sequencing system, which will enable customers to dramatically scale their use of PacBio's celebrated HiFi sequencing technology. Revio is designed to provide customers with the ability to sequence up to 1,300 human whole genomes per year at 30-fold coverage for less than $1,000 per genome. With this scale and pricing, PacBio believes Revio will enable the use of HiFi sequencing for large studies in human genetics, cancer research, agricultural genomics, and more.

Scientists have achieved many 'firsts' with HiFi sequencing on PacBio's Sequel IIe sequencing system -- the first complete telomere-to-telomere assembly of a human genome (Nurk 2022), the first haplotype-resolved methylomes in a rare disease cohort (Cheung 2022), the first population surveys of structural variation with long reads (All of US Research Program), the first single-cell full isoform catalogs (Al'Khafaji 2021), and the first complete assembly of the highly complex oat genome (European Seed 2020). Revio uses the same groundbreaking HiFi chemistry -- producing accurate native long reads with uniform coverage, extraordinary application performance for variant calling and assembly, and accurate DNA methylation detection -- but at a much larger scale. Revio will be PacBio's first system to feature state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs, providing a 20-fold increase in computing power compared to the Sequel IIe.

In addition to providing accelerated basecalling to meet Revio's higher throughput, the AI-enabled compute will integrate deep learning algorithms to detect DNA methylation from standard sequencing libraries, and DeepConsensus, a deep learning method developed with Google Health to improve the yield and accuracy of HiFi sequencing. Revio will require 50% fewer consumables than the Sequel IIe and includes substantial improvements in workflow and convenience. Revio will make it possible to set up a subsequent run while the current run is in progress, which provides increased schedule flexibility for an operator to load runs any time of day and maximize system throughput.