We’re packing our bags for Baltimore, land of crab cakes and this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. With some 6,500 scientists expected to attend, the conference is one of the largest in the field — and with that comes a remarkable array of talks, posters, educational workshops, and much more.
The meeting will kick off with a splash: a presidential symposium featuring Francis Collins, David Hunter, Naomi Wray, and Marylyn Ritchie. The speakers will talk about precision medicine, large-scale genomic studies, and integration of electronic health records for clinical impact. ASHG always does a great job honoring the field’s best and brightest; this year, awards will be given to Emmanuelle Charpentier, Kay Davies, Jennifer Doudna, Leonid Kruglyak, and Hunt Willard, among many others.
If you’re attending the meeting, we hope you’ll have a chance to check out poster #1936, “An integrated method for extraction of high-molecular-weight DNA and preparation of genomic sequencing libraries using agarose gels” (Wed, Oct. 7th, 5 pm – 7 pm, clinical genetic testing section). From our R&D team, the poster presents information on a tool under development that we think will be particularly helpful for scientists and clinical researchers in genomics. The HLS enables fully automated, rapid purification of high molecular weight DNA directly from blood or cells. This HMW DNA (>50 Kb) is increasingly important for long-read sequencing and other applications. The poster shows how we accomplish this, as well as some milestones, such as the recovery of DNA fragments as large as 800 Kb.
The Sage Science team will be exhibiting in booth #1016, where we’d be happy to talk to you about how automated DNA size selection can help you produce better results for your genome sequencing projects.