Between Ion World and ASHG, last week was a conference frenzy here in Boston. The Sage Science team had a great experience at both events — it was wonderful getting to talk to so many scientists in the sequencing field, including many of our customers.
At Ion World, we shared our size selection approach with researchers interested in amplicon sequencing; this has been a natural fit for users of PGM and Proton. The two-day meeting was filled with excellent talks, including technology updates from Life Technologies. The advent of a new amplification step will help reduce sample prep time and cut the overall turnaround from more than 12 hours to less than 8, according to customer Dagan Wells from the University of Oxford. The Ion workflow continues to recommend the use of Pippin sizing for most efficient loading and precise assembly results.
No sooner had we broken down our setup at Ion World than we were assembling our full booth for ASHG’s enormous exhibit hall. This was the first conference where we got to display the newest member of the Sage Science product portfolio, the upcoming Sage ELF (that’s short for Electrophoretic Lateral Fractionator – expect it in January).
This tool can take 12 contiguous fractions of a single sample, making it ideal for clinical and research pipelines running precious samples. It will allow users to prepare multiple libraries from each sample — for example, a long-insert library for PacBio, plus shorter-insert libraries for Ion Torrent or Illumina sequencing — and truly maximize the information that can be gleaned from a single sample.
Much of the excitement at ASHG related to resolving complex genetic structures, with lots of attention paid to the new human reference assembly coming soon from the Genome Reference Consortium. Plenty of large-scale studies were presented during ASHG, often featuring thousands of exomes or hundreds of genomes — confirmation that the field is ramping up to high-powered studies more likely to help determine the genetic root of rare and even common diseases. We are proud to see our technologies are helping in many of these important projects.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booths at Ion World and ASHG!