page_title: Pacific Biosciences
section_title: Sequencing instruments
hierarchical_section_title: Pacific Biosciences / Products / Sequencing instruments
caption_attribution_description: English: PacBio RSII - photo taken at the Max Planck Genomzentrum Cologne, Germany
context_page_description: Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. is an American biotechnology company founded in 2004 that develops and manufactures systems for gene sequencing and some novel real time biological observation. PacBio describes its platform as single molecule real time sequencing, based on the properties of zero-mode waveguides. The company's first commercial product, the PacBio RS, was sold to a limited set of customers in 2010 and was commercially released in early 2011. A subsequent version of the sequencer called the PacBio RS II was released in April 2013. On September 25, 2013 a partnership between Pacific Biosciences and Roche Diagnostics was announced for the development of in vitro diagnostic products using the technology, with Roche providing US$75,000,000 in the deal. In 2015, the company launched a new sequencing instrument called the Sequel System with approximately 7-fold greater capacity than the PacBio RS II. Then in April 2019 the company launched the Sequel II system with a further 8-fold increase in throughput.
context_section_description: The company's first scientific instrument, called the “PacBio RS”, was released to a limited set of eleven customers in late 2010.  Sequencing provider GATC Biotech was selected by Pacific Biosciences as its first European service provider in late 2010.  The product was then commercially released in early 2011.  A new version of the sequencer called the "PacBio RS II" was released in April 2013; it produced longer sequence reads and offered higher throughput than the original RS instrument. The RS instrument will officially be supported until the end of 2021.
  In September 2015, the company released a new sequencing instrument, the Sequel System. The sequencer has increased capacity with 1 million zero-mode waveguides compared to 150,000 in the PacBio RS II, and is approximately one-third the size and one-half the price of the PacBio RS II.
  In April 2019, the company released an upgraded Sequel II system with support for a new SMRT Cell with eight million ZMW's, increasing the expected throughput per SMRT Cell by a factor of eight.
caption: A PacBio RSII sequencer
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