Pacific Biosciences of California Inc (PACB)

[Paulieme]

Friday, July 11, 2014ISMB 2014: The World Cup of Bioinformatics
We’re eager for the #ISMB conference — it’s the 22nd annual Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology event — kicking off this weekend in Boston. As we continue to push our technology to deliver longer read lengths, we have been honored to work with many leading bioinformaticians to optimize the processing and analysis of our data.

Several of those experts will be speaking at ISMB this year. On Sunday, attendees will hear from Adam Phillippy of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center. He’ll be presenting at noon on producing complete genome assemblies using Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT®) Sequencing data. Adam’s team recently developed a new assembler called MHAP that dramatically reduces CPU power needed for building assemblies, so we are eager to hear more.

Later that day, Gene Myers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, will give the 2014 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award keynote presentation entitled “DNA Assembly: Past, Present, and Future,” in which he'll reflect on genome assembly challenges throughout his career. According to his abstract, Myers’ talk will also cover “the surprising transition from skepticism of whole-genome shotgun sequencing to an irrational acceptance of NGS whole-genome shotgun over short reads.” He’ll speak about Dazzler, a new tool he developed to assemble genomes as large as 10 Gb directly from long PacBio® reads.

There are several other terrific keynotes scheduled for the meeting. On Monday, Harvard’s Zak Kohane will give a talk outlining the opportunities he sees for biomedical quantitative analysis experts to participate in the healthcare revolution happening today. On Tuesday, Russ Altman will offer a presentation on using informatics to better understand drug response from the molecular to the population level.

With a history of two decades of high-profile talks, ISMB is arguably the World Cup of the bioinformatics world. We hope to see you there! http://blog.pacificbiosciences.com/2014/07/ismb-2014-world-cup-of-bioinformatics.html