The International Conference on Genomics in the Americas (ICG), organized by BGI and UC Davis, is taking place on Sept 12-13 in Sacramento, CA.
One of the keynote presentations in the opening session comes from Nobel Laureate Richard Roberts, Chief Scientific Officer of New England Biolabs. Entitled “Bacterial Methylomes,” the talk will cover some recent work Roberts has done using SMRT® Sequencing to characterize the full, genome-wide methylation marks in various strains of microbes. This kind of work “has yielded a plethora of new and interesting results,” Roberts told BioMed Central recently.
Later that day, Ken Dewar from McGill University will talk about his experience with SMRT Sequencing in a talk entitled “Tomorrow’s Genome: Complete Bacterial Genomes in <24 h for Outbreak Response.” Dewar, who heads up a highly regarded core facility, has been making tremendous inroads on generating high-quality, rapid, affordable genome sequences of microbes. The PacBio sequencing platform is a cornerstone of that pipeline.
For anyone who wants to learn more about our latest technology innovations and their applications in microbiology, our CSO Jonas Korlach will be speaking as well. His presentation, “Finished Microbial Genomes and Epigenomes on a Large Scale,” will showcase recent work extending long reads, automating the assembly and finishing process, and sequencing to provide closed assemblies for several different microbes.
If you’re attending in person, we also recommend a poster from our own Susana Wang, et al., entitled “Greater than 10 kb Read Lengths Routine when Sequencing with the PacBio RS II.”
We hope to see you next week in Sacramento!