[owlmonkey]

If they were really interested in discovering unknown genes, they should have used PacBio to sequence the whole genome instead of just 83% of it via Illumina. That assembly quality ("a contig N50-length of 5.4 kb and a scaffold N50-length of 470 kb") is truly awful compared to a PacBio assembly.

[folli]

And also about a magnitude more expensive

[owlmonkey]

Not any more, and especially not compared to the HiSeq 2000 used for that paper. PacBio's raw sequencing cost is now about on par with where the HiSeq was when it first launched. And because of the error profile you don't need as much coverage and it's a lot less effort to assemble. So the total project cost now is comparable, even if the raw sequencing cost is higher still.