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Basecamp Research Selects PacBio HiFi Sequencing to Power Trillion Gene Atlas Initiative
PacBio’s Revio system and SPRQ-Nx chemistry to enable an order-of-magnitude expansion of HiFi metagenomic sequencing for scaling AI-designed therapeutics
About this update from Pacific Biosciences Of California, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"PacBio’s Revio system and SPRQ-Nx chemistry to enable an order-of-magnitude expansion of HiFi metagenomic sequencing for scaling AI-designed therapeutics\nMENLO PARK, Calif., March 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PacBio (NASDAQ: PACB), a leading provider of high-quality, long-read sequencing technologies, today announced that Basecamp Research, a frontier AI lab for therapeutic design, has selected PacBio HiFi sequencing on the Revio® system to generate large-scale environmental and host-associated metagenomic data for the Trillion Gene Atlas—a landmark scientific initiative designed to generate and model biological data at the trillion-gene scale. The collaboration is expected to result in approximately 100,000 deeply sequenced samples from over 31 countries across 5 continents, creating the largest and most diverse high-fidelity metagenomic dataset assembled to date. As AI models for biological design advance, model performance increasingly depends on the diversity, quality, and genomic context of training data. Basecamp’s EDEN (Environmentally-Derived Evolutionary Network) model leverages large-scale evolutionary metagenomic data to capture biological signals often missing from curated reference genomes—particularly when long-range genomic context is preserved. PacBio HiFi sequencing combines high accuracy with long reads to resolve complex genomes and microbial communities. In metagenomics—where function can vary across closely related strains—HiFi sequencing preserves genomic context to enable complete, strain-resolved assemblies and accurate reconstruction of repeats, mobile elements, structural variants, plasmids, phage genomes, and operons. The resulting metagenomic data are highly accurate, reliable, and comprehensive, providing a strong foundation for AI model training. With SPRQ-Nx chemistry, PacBio further improves sequencing efficiency and cost-effectiveness, making large-scale, deeply sequenced metagenomic projects increasingly economical. “We are thrilled to be partnering with Basecamp Research as they aim to expand known evolutionary genetic diversity 100-fold,” said Christian Henry, President and CEO of PacBio. “Because HiFi sequencing technology combines high accuracy with long reads to preserve full genomic structure, we believe HiFi sequencing is the ideal data type for developing the AI-driven insights to drive...