Pacific Biosciences announced plans to allow reuse of its most expensive consumables and rolled out Sprq‑Nx chemistry to boost output, targeting sub‑$300 per genome costs for large projects. The company said select customers could see up to 40% savings by washing and reusing SMRT cell chips on Revio systems, positioning long reads more competitively against short‑read platforms for population genomics. Concurrently, a Nature Biotechnology paper introduced DeepSomatic, a somatic small‑variant caller optimized for both short‑ and long‑read data and released public benchmarking datasets. Improved analytics plus lower per‑genome costs address two major barriers for deploying long reads at scale: economics and variant calling accuracy. Taken together, the hardware, chemistry and software advances accelerate adoption of long‑read WGS in clinical and large‑cohort settings, with implications for rare disease diagnostics, structural variant discovery, and tumor genomics.