Obtain higher genome coverage and identify variations.
Long (250-base) reads effectively span many sequences that micro-reads interpret as repeats and eliminate the need to filter against a reference.
Obtain high-quality, comprehensive assemblies and minimize costly follow-up experiments such as gap closure.
Scaffolded assemblies with >99% accuracy are possible, in addition to approximately 10-fold fewer contigs and minimal mis-assemblies.
Sequence and assemble the transcriptome of very complex organism (e.g., plants) as an alternative to de novo genome sequencing.
Long reads provide enough contiguous sequence to de novo assemble unknown transcriptomes, identify splice variants, and annotate transcripts of unknown function.
Identify low-frequency mutations and haplotypes over the full exon length.
Reads from single DNA molecules span typical amplicons such as exons.
Generate a more complete inventory and perform functional analysis of non-coding RNAs in the genome.
Long reads cover the range of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) species (from 20 nt to 300 nt) and 99.5% single-read accuracy enables differentiation of highly similar sequences.