Illumina are to purchase Pacific Biosciences for $1.2 billion. Illumina already dominate the short-read NGS market and this will give them a high performance long-read technology as well, useful for de novo sequencing and other applications. It is possible there might be competition law/antitrust hurdles to clear, although the technologies tend to serve different applications so this may not prove a serious concern.
The companies said their deal will create a sequencing powerhouse that will combine Illumina’s short-read technologies with PacBio’s long-read sequencing capabilities more suitable for de novo sequencing and sequencing of highly homologous regions of genomes.
https://www.genengnews.com/news/illumina-adds-long-read-capabilities-with-1-2b-pacbio-acquisition/
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