GATC Biotech to purchase PacBio real-time sequencing technology

GATC Biotech announced today that it has agreed to purchase the PacBio RS platform, a single molecule, real-time (SMRT™) sequencing technology. The new PacBio RS will be the fifth sequencing technology for GATC Biotech. The system is planned for installation in early 2011.
 
GATC Biotech plans to use the new platform for resolving structural variations, for example in human cancer genomes, and for the detection and confirmation of rare SNPs. In addition, the future application to enable direct sequencing of methylated bases will make the system attractive for regulatory studies, for example for the pharmaceutical or diagnostics industry.

"Pacific Biosciences has chosen GATC Biotech to be our first European service provider because the company is well experienced in applying major sequencing technologies in a broad spectrum of projects and in gearing up new sequencing technologies quickly for lab routines," comments Terry Pizzie, Vice President, Europe for Pacific Biosciences.

"We are looking forward to offering our customers PacBio's third-generation sequencing platform and are confident that we will be able to offer the SMRT technology to our customers within a short period of time after successful installation," adds Thomas Pohl, Chief Technology Officer of GATC Biotech.

GATC Biotech is Europe's leading sequencing service provider. The company more than doubled its staff within the past three years and has currently close to 120 employees.