The Sequencing, Finishing, and Analysis in the Future (SFAF) meeting kicks off today in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The conference is hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory and focuses on the analytical details that are so important as the community assesses how to get the most out of all this sequence data.
This year, we will have two PacBio speakers, and there will be a number of other talks from users of our long-read sequence data. Steve Turner, our CTO, will speak on Wednesday morning about the use of Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT®) Sequencing for generating highly contiguous genome assemblies as well as for transcriptome analysis that can resolve complete isoforms. Steve will look at how chemistry and other improvements can push PacBio’s average consensus accuracy to ~Q50 and N50 data to greater than 10,000 base pairs.
In a separate talk, Jason Chin, our senior director of bioinformatics, will discuss assembly and phasing of polymorphic heterozygous diploid genomes. Jason will present assembly results from synthetic Arabidopsis hybrids and a new string graph-based assembler that can handle diploid assemblies. Jason will also have a poster at SFAF on work with the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa, demonstrating how to integrate DNA sequence, base modification, and isoform sequence data into a comprehensive view of the organism’s function.
We’re also eagerly anticipating talks from Gene Myers on his Dazzler tool, Baylor’s Jeff Rogers upgrading large genomes, James Gurtowski from CSHL discussing near perfect de novo assemblies of eukaryotic genomes, WashU’s Tina Graves-Lindsay, and many others. There’s also an excellent poster from Adam English from Baylor on his new PBHoney algorithm, which identifies structural variants from SMRT Sequencing data. See the full agenda for SFAF 2014.
Hope to see you in Santa Fe or follow along on twitter, #SFAF2014!