Illumina and Pacific Biosciences announced they have signed an agreement for Illumina to acquire Pacific Biosciences at a price of $8.00 per Pacific Biosciences share in an all-cash transaction.
The agreement has been approved by the board of directors of Illumina and Pacific Biosciences. The acquisition complements Illumina sequencing solutions with accurate long-read sequencing capabilities to answer a set of complex genomic questions. While Illumina's accurate and economic short-read sequencing platforms address the majority of sequencing applications optimally, select applications, such as de novo sequencing and sequencing of highly homologous regions of genomes, are better addressed with accurate long-reads.