It’s the start of a bright, shiny new year. If you’ve been in the genomics field long enough, you know that can mean only one thing: we’re getting ready for PAG!
Officially the Plant and Animal Genome XXVI Conference, this meeting attracts more than 3,000 scientists from around the world. Sociologically speaking, it’s a remarkable event: attendees sort themselves by the organism they study, leading to get-togethers of “cow people,” “oat people,” and so on. Each group has its own traditions, and the whole experience is really something.
Held this year from January 13-17, PAG promises to do what it does best: serve as the gathering place where all these individual communities come together to share updates on the latest science and technology. We always enjoy geeking out on the wealth of posters and catching some of the high-profile plenary talks. This year, we’re particularly looking forward to hearing from the University of Washington’s Jay Shendure, who will be speaking about new genomic frontiers, and USDA’s Doreen Ware, who has accomplished real breakthroughs for the maize community recently and will be presenting on agricultural challenges and opportunities from big data. PAG also keeps up with cutting-edge science; new workshops this year focus on paleogenomics, managing big data, and farming insects as a food source, among others.
If you’ll be attending PAG, please take a moment to swing by booth #422 to say hello to the Sage Science team. We’ll be showcasing our portfolio of automated DNA size selection projects, which can help increase average read lengths for PacBio and Oxford Nanopore sequencers, and improve the sequencing efficiency for Illumina sequencers. We’d be happy to hear about your research and figure out whether automated sizing could help you generate better results.
We hope to see you in San Diego. Have a great PAG, everyone!