PacBio Announces Kinnex RNA Kits

PacBio (NASDAQ: PACB), a leading developer of high-quality, highly accurate sequencing solutions, today announced it has begun taking orders for its groundbreaking Kinnex RNA kits, which increase throughput for full-length RNA, single-cell RNA, and 16S rRNA sequencing on PacBio’s long-read sequencing systems to enable large-scale studies at a resolution difficult to attain with short-read RNA sequencing.

“The new family of Kinnex kits for RNA sequencing are designed to provide customers with cost-effective, end-to-end kitted solutions to support their research,” said Christian Henry, President and Chief Executive Officer of PacBio. “The Revio system brought scale to HiFi whole genome sequencing. Our customers have asked for the same for RNA sequencing, and these Kinnex kits deliver just that with tens of millions of fulllength reads per run. It’s a game changer for the RNA sequencing market.”

The Kinnex kits are based on the MAS-Seq method, which concatenates smaller DNA fragments into longer, HiFi-ready libraries. Short-read sequencing has difficulty covering entire transcripts, while long-read sequencing of one transcript would traditionally result in unused sequencing capacity. With Kinnex, customers can concatenate transcripts into long libraries for HiFi sequencing, increasing throughput and making long-read RNA sequencing more cost effective.

The new Kinnex single-cell RNA kit builds on the existing MAS-Seq for Single Cell 3’ kit, adding additional support of the 10x Genomics 5’ kit and library multiplexing. The Kinnex full-length RNA kit offers full-length RNA sequencing with abundant information and flexible sample multiplexing.

The kit can yield 40 million reads on the Revio system per 25M SMRT cell and 15 million reads on the Sequel II and IIe systems per 8M SMRT cell. Additionally, the end-to-end workflow includes access to PacBio’s SMRT Link software for full-length RNA and isoform data analysis.

“The Kinnex kits now allow us to generate HiFi long-read transcriptome data at a much higher throughput than its predecessor Iso-Seq and do it at the single-cell level. This is going to be very useful for more accurately annotating genic regions relative to short reads in our genome assemblies, and to measure their expression levels at the single cell resolution,” said Erich Jarvis, Chair of the Vertebrate Genomes Project and Director the Vertebrate Genome Lab.

Finally, the Kinnex 16S rRNA kit enables extraordinary resolution, higher quality microbiome sequencing at any scale. The kit will yield 60 million reads on the Revio system per 25M SMRT cell and 25 million reads on Sequel II and IIe systems per 8M SMRT cell. With a recommendation of 384-plex per library, this new kit will allow fulllength 16S rRNA sequencing at a competitive per-sample cost relative to current standard short read sequencing.

“We’re excited about the opportunity to drive real advances in microbiome studies and translational research for our customers with Kinnex 16S rRNA kit,” said Dr. Shuiquan Tang, Director of Microbiome at Zymo Research. “Having the capability to do full-length 16S sequencing on PacBio systems allows us to deliver higher resolution, species level taxonomic data to our customers at a price that is competitive to short read sequencing.”

With the Kinnex kit offerings, Revio will provide customers with the ability to sequence up to 5,200 RNA samples per year for less than $500 USD per sample – a 16-fold throughput increase in number of samples from what was previously available for PacBio RNA users on the Sequel II and IIe systems. All three Kinnex kits sell for $5,700 USD each at 12 reactions.

PacBio is now accepting orders for each kit and will begin shipments in December 2023.