AGBT Presentation: Increasing the Solve Rate of Rare and Undiagnosed Genetic Diseases with HiFi Sequencing

In this talk, Jonas Korlach, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at PacBio describes how using PacBio HiFi reads, which are greater than 99.9% accurate and up to 25 kb long, led to the detection of structural variants in examples of previously unexplained rare genetic diseases. Genetic diseases affect as much as 10% of the population and over 50% of cases currently remain unexplained. Similarly, Mendelian diseases include over 8,500 described disorders, however at present ~40% have an unknown genetic cause. In addition, he highlights the strength of complete, phased, high-accuracy human WGS for simultaneously yielding high-quality information about any other locus or group of loci, which results in a single genetic assay that encompasses all others.