Third generation

The next era of DNA sequencing technology, termed third-generation sequencing (TGS), has gained a place in biology as a way to study genomes, transcriptomes, and metagenomes at an unprecedented resolution. These technologies work by single-molecule sequencing and provide:

• Long reads with no amplification.
• Direct detection of epigenetic modifications on native DNA.
• Direct sequencing through regions of the genome inaccessible or difficult to analyze by short-read platforms.
• Uniform coverage of the genome as they are not as sensitive to GC content as short-read platforms.

There are several companies currently at the heart of third generation sequencing technology development; namely, Pacific Biosciences, Oxford Nanopore Technology, Quantapore. These companies are taking fundamentally different approaches to sequencing single DNA molecules.