The single-cell genomics industry does not stop advancing, with a steady stream of new companies, kits, acquisitions, and more. One new company, ArgenTag, was founded in Argentina during the COVID-19 pandemic for two reasons: the lack of access to single-cell instruments in South America and the conviction that long-read technologies would gain traction in transcriptomics.
Today, the company announced that it has joined the PacBio Compatible Partner Program. The co-marketing agreement confirms the compatibility of ArgenTag’s Single-Cell RNA Library Kit with PacBio’s Kinnex RNA kits, enabling researchers to achieve long-read isoform sequencing at single-cell resolution.
The partnership eliminates the requirement for specialized capital equipment for cell partitioning. Why focus on long reads? “When you do short reads, you’re not getting all the information,” Sofía Lavista Llanos, PhD, director of process development at ArgenTag, told GEN in a 2024 interview. She added that short reads provide just a snapshot.
ArgenTag’s workflow uses a portable, simple, gravity-based microfluidic chip-based technology for partitioning and barcoding; the chip’s microwells partition the cells and contain beads that carry the barcodes. The technology, designed to enable multiplex long-read sequencing, first appeared in a paper in Scientific Reports in May 2022, entitled “Robust and scalable barcoding for massively parallel long-read sequencing.”
When paired with PacBio’s Kinnex kits and HiFi long-read sequencing, the benchtop workflow provides a scalable method for generating full-length, single-cell transcriptomic data. It aids researchers who want to capture complete isoform diversity, alternative splicing events, and gene fusions, which are often missed by short-read methods which focus on the 3′ end. And access to full-length isoform data at the single-cell level opens new possibilities for biomarker discovery, understanding complex gene regulation, and developing novel therapeutics.
ArgenTag is one of the only companies developing solutions natively designed for long-read sequencing. This focus on high-resolution, full-length isoform data provides researchers with a new level of biological clarity that is unattainable with short-read platforms. The platform includes an integrated software solution. The company provides bioinformatics tools optimized for long-read data. This software demultiplexes reads and assigns them to their cell of origin, streamlining the complex analysis of long-read single-cell datasets.
ArgenTag is announcing a Single-Cell Long-Read Research Grant Program. The grant will provide selected researchers with access to the ArgenTag single-cell kit to support novel or exploratory long-read single-cell projects. The grant application opens February 17, 2026, and closes on March 3, 2026, at 11:59 PM ET. Additional details, including eligibility criteria and application instructions, are available on the ArgenTag website.
“Our mission at ArgenTag is to enable scientists to better understand health and disease with long-read single-cell sequencing solutions,” said Leandro Ciappina, CEO of ArgenTag. “By joining PacBio Compatible, we are enabling more researchers to access high-resolution, long-read data. This compatibility empowers any lab to explore the full complexity of the transcriptome at single-cell resolution.”
