GATC Biotech to be PacBio's First European Service Provider

By Bio-IT World Staff

September 22, 2010 | GATC Biotech announced today that it will be purchasing the PacBio RS platform for planned installation of early 2011. The new PacBio RS will be the fifth sequencing technology for GATC Biotech. 

“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,” said Terry Pizzie, Vice President, Europe for Pacific Biosciences in a press release.

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.

“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.