Pacific Biosciences unveiled a plan to let select customers reuse its most expensive SMRT cell consumables and launched a new sequencing chemistry, Sprq‑Nx, to raise throughput and add 5‑hydroxymethylcytosine detection. PacBio said the measures could lower per‑genome consumable costs for large projects by as much as 40%, bringing long‑read whole‑genome sequencing close to $300 per genome at 20X coverage. The company will beta test automated SMRT cell wash-and-reuse workflows for heavy Revio users and offer bundled consumable pricing for high‑volume customers. CEO Christian Henry framed the changes as a move to close the price gap with short‑read incumbents and expand PacBio’s addressable market for population-scale projects. Separately, South Korea selected PacBio HiFi sequencing for its national pangenome reference project, a telomere‑to‑telomere initiative to sequence more than 1,000 genomes. That government selection validates the platform’s accuracy for structural variant and complex region analysis and signals increased demand for long reads in national and clinical reference efforts.