Bionano Genomics makes systems that do optical genome mapping which can reveal important information that has previously been missing in genome research. Bionano's Saphyr system can rapidly identify genome variation like never before.

Historically, the sequencing space, (think life sciences, molecular diagnostics, and personalized medicines), has been dominated by short-read technology. 'Short-read' refers to millions of short DNA sequences (called reads). And read-length refers to the number of base pairs sequenced from a DNA fragment.

The problem is, the first step in the sample preparation for short-read sequencing is to fragment the genome into small pieces.

Bionano Genomics believes that there is a tremendous amount of information lost in the fragmentation step that is never recovered in this short-read process.

Bionano wants to bring very long read information to the market so that when you try and put the fragmented puzzle back together, the size of the pieces are much bigger- allowing you to get a more complete and possibly very different picture of the genome you are analyzing.