In all honesty, I don’t know how big a difference Pacific Biosystem’s technology* will make to genomics. I doubt anyone can until the machines are actually in use by sequencing centers and people can start to make judgements about how they behave under real life conditions. How much sequence can actually be produced per day or per dollar? How long will the reads actually get? What sort of sequencing errors are most common with the technology and how common are they?
But now I know the people who will be the first to find out the answers to these questions. Today (yesterday by the time this is scheduled to publish) Pacific Biosystem’s announced where the first ten of their new sequencing machines will be going:
View Pacific Biosystems Sequencers in a larger map (click the markers to see the names of the institutions receiving the sequencers)