Illumina Adds Long-Read Capabilities with Planned $1.2B Acquisition of PacBio

Illumina has agreed to acquire Pacific Biosciences for approximately $1.2 billion, in a deal designed to expand the sequencing giant’s offerings with PacBio’s long-read sequencing technologies.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.The complementary offeri