AGBT... where are the big announcements

The 14th AGBT meeting kicks off in one week. Unfortunately I won't be there this year so don't expect a daily round-up of what's good from me! For those of you blogging and tweeting AGBT have crafted some simple graphics to indicate what you can, and more importantly can't talk about...

There don't seem to have been the big announcments from Illlumina, Life and others we have seen for the past few years. No MiSeq, no Proton; I guess you'll have to do with what's on offer from the speakers instead, but of course that's the real reason we all go anyway.

Interstingly there appears to be no Gold or Platinum sponsors this year, I know budgets are tight but who's paying for the parties and picking up teh bar tab! A look at the sponsorship page shows that the welcome cocktails have not yet been sponsored and nor have some of the dinners (I am sure they'll still be on though). And the legendary AGBT rucksack appears to have space for more corporate sponsorship, although I suspect there is no time to add anyone elses logo now.

I looked through the agenda as it includes some fantastic talks, especially on the use of NGS in the clinic. Below is the stand-out stuff I'll be sad to miss. Please do write about these if you are going.

The most interesting clinical talks from my perspective:

On Thursday Christine Eng and Kjersti Aagaard from Baylor presents 450 clinical exome sequencing cases and their work on metagenomics medicine. Elizabeth Worthey, Medical College of Wisconsin presents  experiences from their WGS Based genomic medicine clinic. Stephen Kingsmore, Children’s Mercy Hospital and Jonathan Berg, UNC Chapel Hill talk about experiences of pediatric genomic medicine and management of incidental findings. Matthew Wiggin, Boreal Genomics is talking about something right up my street “Multiplexed Detection of Low Abundance, Tumor Related Nucleic Acids in the Plasma of Cancer Patients”. On Friday Steve Scherer, Sick Kids will talk about whole genome sequencing and its use in autism research. And on Saturday Phil Stephens from Foundation Medicine will talk about their genomic profiling of over 1,000 FFPE Tumors with the Foundation One assay.

The most interesting non-clinical talks from my perspective:
Gabe Rudy, Golden Helix talks about his familys experience with their 23andMe exomes. Whilst they have no big pre-announcments Illumina's Geoff Smith will be talking about their aquisition of Moleculo “10kb Reads on HiSeq” (Geoff gives a good talk and I expect lots of people are looking forward to hearing about this technology). There is another talk on Moleculo from Jeremy Schmutz, HudsonAlpha Institute “Evaluating Moleculo Long Read Technology for de novo Whole Genome Sequencing”. Michael Schatz, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is talking about the use of PacBio (I think) in assembling crop genomes and X. Sunney Xie, Harvard University
is talking about single cell detection of SNV & CNV with whole genome seqeuncing.

PS: I'm writing a post on an idea to create Moleculo style reads which I hope to have completed before the talks.

PPS: Don't forget to enter the competitions!