The Sage Science crew is back in Boston, ready for some much-needed rest after a fun-filled ASHG 2014. We didn’t meet all 7,000+ attendees at the event, but we certainly gave it our best shot! Many thanks to all of the scientists who stopped by our booth to find out how something as simple as precise DNA sizing can make a real difference in data quality for next-gen sequencing results. People who did stop by got a sneak preview of a new instrument we’ll be launching soon — for the rest of you, stay tuned!
Several of the final talks of the conference focused on cancer studies, which had us particularly interested since so many of our customers use fractionation tools for this application. Whether cancer genomics is interrogated with whole-genome sequencing, targeted sequencing, RNA-seq, miRNA isolation, structural studies, or ChIP-seq, our users have published on it. (You can check out a sampling of those papers here.) The talks on cancer epigenetics, such as using methylation markers to detect tumor DNA in blood, were fascinating.
Of course, there was the usual debate about exome sequencing versus gene panels for a range of uses. We understand the need to choose one of these options now, but as ardent DNA sequencing champions, we’ve got high hopes for a time when whole-genome sequencing is affordable enough to be the no-brainer solution for every application.
Already looking forward to ASHG 2015 in Baltimore!