PacBio has commenced the commercialisation of its Onso short-read sequencing instruments with the first customer shipments.

The Translational Genomics Research Institute, a division of the City of Hope, is among the earliest users of the Onso system.

PacBio aims to conclude the deployment of the first Onso instrument and ship-related consumables by the end of this month.

The company has developed the Onso short-read system to deliver accuracy through its sequencing by binding chemistry on a flexible benchtop platform.

It has the capability to deliver 400 to 500 million reads during a 48-hour sequencing cycle.

For enabling paired and single-end reads, the company intends to provide 200 and 300-cycle kit configurations.

With the potential to achieve accuracy levels exceeding Q40, the system helps scientists gain deep insight into ctDNA research applications such as minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring and other ‘needle-in-haystack’ applications that need sensitive variant detection.

PacBio president and CEO Christian Henry said: “We believe PacBio is the only company to offer both highly accurate, native short and native long-read sequencing technologies.

“As a result, we believe this uniquely positions us to offer more complete solutions to our customers’ challenges and help researchers unlock novel insights in oncology and disease research, among other areas.”

In addition, the company plans to introduce library preparation solutions to support various sample types, as well as library conversion kits that will allow the sequencing of existing third-party libraries on the Onso system.