We’re already looking forward to the 115th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. It’ll be held in New Orleans this year from May 30th to June 2nd, giving us a great excuse to stop by Café du Monde and fill up on their world-famous beignets. Then we’ll be heading to the city’s enormous convention center for ASM, along with 8,000 other attendees.
We go to lots of scientific conferences each year, but ASM is the only one that so effectively freaks us out. (We’re just now recovering from the chikungunya virus presentations we saw at this meeting last year.) ASM is where you go to learn what’s living on the armrest of the airplane seat, in the depths of the jungle, and on your keyboard. It’s not for the faint of heart.
But it is informative and thought-provoking. We’re eager for the opening session, in which Pieter Dorrestein from the University of Californa, San Diego, will give a talk with the intriguing title “The Social Molecular Network of Microbes.” Samantha Joye from the University of Georgia will present data on the microbial response to the Deepwater oil spill, and New York University’s Martin Blaser will talk about “Our Missing Microbes.”
In the last several years, it’s been a thrill to see how much next-gen sequencing technologies have shaped what’s possible in microbiology. The shift to high-throughput, rapid platforms that can produce finished microbial sequences with minimal effort has opened all sorts of doors in this field. As NGS becomes a workhorse of this community, automated DNA size selection has become a critical addition to these sequencing pipelines as well.
Sage Science will be in booth #766, so please stop by to say hello! We’d be happy to talk to you about how more accurate DNA sizing can improve your NGS-based microbial experiments.