Hundreds of SMRT scientists came together recently in Leiden to learn about the latest updates to PacBio technology and to showcase their data analysis tools. Extremely useful information was shared, and future collaborations were sparked. For those who weren’t able to jet to the Netherlands to attend, we’ve rounded up the top tools and tips presented at the European SMRT Informatics Developers Meeting. For an in-depth report on the event, check out this blog post by PacBio Principal Scientist Elizabeth Tseng. SMRT Link – Of course our own open-source SMRT analysis software suite will be top of the list. Updates…
What can a cute, cuddly, stingless bee from the Brazilian rainforest teach us about eusociality and mitochondrial evolution? Natalia S Araujo wants to find out, and she’s not the only one. As the only bee species in which true polygyny (multiple fertile queens in the same colony) occurs, there is great interest in Melipona bicolor, and its mitochondrial genome (mt genome) was one of the first sequenced in bees. But the sequence was incomplete and lacked information about its mitochondrial gene expression pattern. So Araujo, a postdoctoral researcher of animal genomics in the GIGA Institute of the University of Liège,…
SMRT Art: Jewelry created from upcycled SMRT cells by Olga Pettersson. When was the last time you sent your DNA off to a day at the spa? Olga Pettersson of the SciLifeLab at Uppsala University lets her molecules relax for up to a week at room temperature to enable them to untangle, achieve better chemical purity, and better sequencing output. It was one of many practical pointers shared by presenters at the popular three-day gathering of PacBio users in Leiden, Netherlands last month. SMRT Leiden featured the scientific discoveries and analytical achievements of more than 30 speakers. Inge Kjaerbolling of…
Last month, we co-hosted the 2nd annual SMRT Leiden conference with Leiden University Medical Center. SMRT Leiden featured three days of excellent presentations, including one day focused on bioinformatics. If you missed it, we’ve prepared this quick recap to cover the highlights. In addition, several of the presentations are available to download, and you can check out tweets from day 1 and day 2. The meeting kicked off with a clinical angle: Eric Schadt from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai gave a keynote talk about capturing the clinically actionable genome. Noting that we are in an age…