Third-generation sequencing (also known as long-read sequencing) is a class of DNA sequencing methods which produce longer sequence reads, under active development since 2008.[1]
Third generation sequencing technologies have the capability to produce substantially longer reads than second generation sequencing, also known as next-generation sequencing.[1] Such an advantage has critical implications for both genome science and the study of biology in general. However, third generation sequencing data have much higher error rates than previous technologies, which can complicate downstream genome assembly and analysis of the resulting data.[2] These technologies are undergoing active development and it is expected that there will be improvements to the high error rates. For applications that are more tolerant to error rates, such as structural variant calling, third generation sequencing has been found to outperform existing methods, even at a low depth of sequencing coverage.[3]