HI all,
I just wanted to drop some notes from this conference in La Jolla, CA. Rather than posting notes from each of the speakers, I'll just give a brief description of the major points that were discussed at the meeting. For starters, this is the first conference I have been to where I actually took a considerable amount of notes from each speaker. There were a number of leaders in the field here, and as expected, they gave phenomenal talks.
Key point #1: More genomes are being sequenced. Elaine Mardis talked about several of her whole human genome sequencing using non-tumor, tumor, metastatic tumor, and even xenograft tumors from the same patient. She talked about a clinical trial with aromatase inhibitor responsive tumors matched with 25 responsive tumors, breast cancer, AML, etc. How much longer will it be before sequencing one human genome won't be enough to get a paper published?
Key Point #2. Joseph Nadeau showed some very exquisite examples of trans-generational effects of mutations. In other words, a mutation that grandma had (and that you don't) may make you fat. You can sequence all day long, but genetics of the patient will not tell you everything. You may need generations of sequencing data to find genetic predispositions.
Key Point #3. Although this wasn't discussed much in the general session, a few of us talked about the need for some sort of standardization. Getting the sequence data is one thing, but as many of the members in this forum well know, that is the easy part. There are so many algorithms out there and couple that with the weaknesses in each of the technologies (both established and those in the pipeline), it is easy to see that there is no single way to do everything. This, I believe is a huge problem. We need something like the MicroArray Quality Consortium for Next-Gen Sequencing. I know the MAQC is already looking at RNA-Seq, but what about the rest?
There were a lot of really great talks, and I don't want to short-change any of them. So far this has been an excellent conference (although not quite AGBT) for the big picture. Oh yeah, and if you are a student, there is no registration fee. If you're not a student, it's $80, so its cheap enough for many to try it out.
I'll post the info from Day 2 when I get a chance.
I just wanted to drop some notes from this conference in La Jolla, CA. Rather than posting notes from each of the speakers, I'll just give a brief description of the major points that were discussed at the meeting. For starters, this is the first conference I have been to where I actually took a considerable amount of notes from each speaker. There were a number of leaders in the field here, and as expected, they gave phenomenal talks.
Key point #1: More genomes are being sequenced. Elaine Mardis talked about several of her whole human genome sequencing using non-tumor, tumor, metastatic tumor, and even xenograft tumors from the same patient. She talked about a clinical trial with aromatase inhibitor responsive tumors matched with 25 responsive tumors, breast cancer, AML, etc. How much longer will it be before sequencing one human genome won't be enough to get a paper published?
Key Point #2. Joseph Nadeau showed some very exquisite examples of trans-generational effects of mutations. In other words, a mutation that grandma had (and that you don't) may make you fat. You can sequence all day long, but genetics of the patient will not tell you everything. You may need generations of sequencing data to find genetic predispositions.
Key Point #3. Although this wasn't discussed much in the general session, a few of us talked about the need for some sort of standardization. Getting the sequence data is one thing, but as many of the members in this forum well know, that is the easy part. There are so many algorithms out there and couple that with the weaknesses in each of the technologies (both established and those in the pipeline), it is easy to see that there is no single way to do everything. This, I believe is a huge problem. We need something like the MicroArray Quality Consortium for Next-Gen Sequencing. I know the MAQC is already looking at RNA-Seq, but what about the rest?
There were a lot of really great talks, and I don't want to short-change any of them. So far this has been an excellent conference (although not quite AGBT) for the big picture. Oh yeah, and if you are a student, there is no registration fee. If you're not a student, it's $80, so its cheap enough for many to try it out.
I'll post the info from Day 2 when I get a chance.
Comment