Of course! I know where I've seen this before.

"The X-Files" Season 3 Episode 2 "Paper Clip" /* insert witty comment about government secrecy and overreach */

(Sure, but PacBio in particular is quite new on the market still. Three years ago they were borderline vaporware!)

And, yeah, most serious sequencing projects I've seen do use a mixture of methods, particularly 454 stuff. But I'm sure they'll switch to IonTorrent and PacBio as opportunities allow.

You're right, it's not an entirely ubiquitous phenomenon. But amongst the plants that do have large, repetitive genomes, fine-grained epigenetics and averaged-out mutations tend to be the primary benefits, IIRC.

The hardware platform of choice is a matter of availability. Here is a map of where most/all of the NGS platforms are in the world; Illumina sequencers are the most common amongst the newer systems.

63x total coverage with from Illumina hardware using a mixture of paired-end libraries, ranging from 200 bp to a whopping 40 Kbp. I'm pretty sure that's sufficient information to estimate the number of large-scale repetitions. Sequencing projects of species for which there is no good relative to scaffold against are typically much more rigorous than what you'd see in cancer research.

...perhaps your hatred towards trees has something to do with these auditory hallucinations?

Yes. All old things are superior. Like typewriters, glaciers, and expired milk.

While the set of large-genomed organisms does include some very sophisticated trees and flowers, it also includes several species of amoeba... so I wouldn't panic just yet.

All a big genome really means for certain is that you're good enough at finding food that you can support it. The substance is a lot more important—some species of shrimp, for example, have 88 or 92 chromosomes, but they're mostly redundant duplicates. Wheat has five copies of every chromosome, too.

Plants tend to have large genomes because they reproduce so rapidly—a field of corn has enough offspring every season to mutate every nucleotide in the whole kit and kaboodle at least once, and because they have very static, slow existences, they can afford to tune themselves very well to their environments. That's what the genes and duplicates are for—giving the plant very fine-grained control over things like how it prepares for the next season based on the weather from the last one.

Inadvisable—much of wood itself (not the bark, the structural stuff underneath) is dead at functional maturity. Trees are just skin and bones! (And plumbing. And really crazy hair. And roots. And sometimes genitals.)

After I was turned onto Babylon 5, I looked you up and found out you were involved in TV shows I enjoyed as a kid. For example, "The Real Ghostbusters" often had compelling plots and dialogue that were noticeably different from your average cartoon. But my curiosity was really piqued when I read you played a large part in creating the short-lived live-action "Captain Powers" series. Assuming the rights could be secured, is there any interest on your part in either continuing/rebooting the story in some form or wrapping things up for those of us who are still dying to find out what happened after the good guys' home base was destroyed?

You know it's a problem when...

Ah, okay. It wasn't even a touch phone; you had to scroll/jump through selectable objects, press the "go" button, and then choose the appropriate action from a numeric menu that popped up.

I used to have a candybar feature-phone (a cheap Huawei) that ran Qualcomm BREW. I guess it's possible they licensed the patent in question, but it did have blue, underlined phone numbers. (Any number, in fact. It was not a smart phone.)