It’s June, and you know what that means: genomics conference season is back! The Sage team will be attending several events this month and we hope to see you at least once.
We kick off next week with PacBio’s annual East Coast User Group Meeting, held in Baltimore June 8th on the University of Maryland campus. We look forward to this event each year because it’s a great glimpse of the cutting-edge science happening around long-read sequencing. This year, there will be a half-day sample prep workshop before the general meeting, and we couldn’t be more excited if we tried. (Hey, we’re sample prep people. Don’t judge.) PacBio users are doing all sorts of cool things in this area, from lowering input requirements to incorporating our SageELF and pooling size fractions for customized pipelines — it’ll be great to see what they’ve accomplished now. If you’re attending the meeting, be sure to track us down and ask about the Iso-Seq method promo we’re launching at the event.
Next up is the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, taking place June 16-20 in our hometown of Boston and featuring an opening keynote from Bill Gates. When we’re not glued to the stage learning about the growing Zika epidemic, we’ll be camped out in booth #306 in the exhibit hall. Stop by and we’ll be happy to discuss your microbial research and help you consider whether automated DNA size selection would make a difference in your work.
Finally, the month wraps up with the second Boston-based Festival of Genomics, June 27-29. This new series of festivals has been such a great surprise: cool science and a different approach, perhaps most obvious this year from the fact that registration is free for everyone. (Last year it was most obvious from the treadmill placed at the entrance; if you missed it, check out this blog post with our favorite Sage photo ever.) We’ll be in booth #214 in the lab zone, happy to field questions or make suggestions about your DNA sequencing workflow.
Assuming we survive it all, we’re awfully glad that July starts with a holiday!