On Feb. 18, 2021, Pacific Biosciences announced that Labcorp had increased its commitment to highly accurate HiFi sequencing with the addition of new PacBioﾮ Sequelﾮ II Systems. The new systems expanded Labcorpﾒs capacity to generate thousands of more complete coronavirus genomes from patient samples each week.

These data are being used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of existing SARS-CoV-2 variants and detect the emergence of new variants circulating in different geographic regions. Labcorp and the CDC utilized PacBio HiFi sequencing data to identify the first known cases of infection from the B.1.351 variant in both South Carolina and Virginia.