Tomorrow morning I head off to the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference (AGBT for short) on Marco Island, Florida; as someone who loves the cold and hates warm places, this is not as exciting for me as you may think. One thing that is exciting, however, is the nice genomics blog presence at the conference; me, Daniel MacArthur, Anthony Fejes, Dan Koboldt and David Dooling will all be playing our parts as Ambasadors to the Blogosphere. Interestingly, assuming independence, there is a 68% chance that at least one of us will get eaten by an alligator; watch this space!
The high blog coverage is justified; we are expecting to get a feel for how the field of DNA sequencing tech will advance over the next year. I will be particularly interested in seeing what Complete Genomics have to report, as well as 3rd gen sequencing presentations from Pacific Biosciences and Life Technologies (ABI). One group that are notable by their lack of a presentation is Oxford Nanopore, which is a shame; I’m sure Nanopore will be talked about plenty anyway.
I have recently got a brand new laptop to replace the brand new laptop that I lost at ASHG last year, and I’m going to keep up the same schedule I did then; a daily blog post summing up the day’s highlights, and more detailed, up-to-the-minute coverage of every talk I see on my twitter feed (@lukejostins). For more AGBT twittering, I think people are going to be using the hashtag #AGBT.
As is traditional when I go away, I will also be sending a daily e-mail with amusing things that have occured at the conference, but that is promised to my girlfriend Hannah, so you will, alas, not get to read it.