It seems we just can’t get enough of genomics conferences! This week, Sage Science is proud to be a sponsor of the Sequencing, Finishing, and Analysis in the Future conference hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory (May 28-30). We’ll be heading to Santa Fe to get our fill of great presentations and posters on what happens after the sequencing run: new methods and best practices for data analysis.
The agenda is built around several useful topics, including: genome sequencing and assembly, finishing tools, genome analysis, and clinical applications of next-gen sequencing. This year’s keynote speakers include Rick Wilson, director of the Genome Institute at Washington University; Deanna Church, senior director of genomics and content at Personalis; and Stephan Schuster, research director at the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering.
Talks at SFAF will cover a good mix of sequencing platforms and applications, from metagenomics to clinical to forensic. There will also be many posters — judging from the terrific abstracts, we’ll be spending a lot of time at the poster sessions.
So why is a sample prep company interested in a data analysis meeting? As we’ve carved out our niche in the DNA size selection space, we have found that the people who are most insistent about using Pippin tools are actually the bioinformaticians. They routinely see the difference in quality between assemblies generated from libraries with and without automated size selection and have determined that data from Pippin-sized libraries comes together into cleaner, more accurate assemblies. Never doubt that your sample prep choices have a significant downstream impact!