Conference Blogging from Marco Island and ABRF

What a week! I've just returned from the AGBT and ABRF meetings in Marco Island Florida and Salt Lake City Utah. I can say the next generation of DNA sequencers are driving a renaissance in DNA sequencing. In the past people would ask me if DNA sequencing was going to be replaced by another technology. I always thought, what a silly thing to say, many of the other technologies are used because sequencing was expensive, and I heard more than one microarray talk start with the "if I could have sequenced, I would have" apology. After all, the first thing someone wants when they have some sequence data is more sequence data.

Next Gen is the evidence that this statement is true.

At AGBT - Applied Biosystems, Illumina and Roche - the big three - had huge presences. Helicos, The Polonator, and Pacific Biosciences were there to provide alternatives and demonstrate that the next "next gen" technologies are just around the corner. At ABRF, the theme continued with more AB, Illumina, and Roche presentations as well as Visigen, and other groups and companies presenting sequencing, sample preparation, and other technologies to make systems more sensitive and keep us on the path to the $1000 genome. All of the talks had this common message: large sequence data sets are extremely powerful, but only if you can deal with the informatics.

That's where we can help!

At ABRF we demonstrated the third version of our Finch software platform with the first integrated and complete LIMS product for all Next Gen sequencing platforms. We call this FinchLab Next Gen Edition. Everyone who came by our booth was blown away. At AGBT we presented our work with BioHDF. In the coming weeks we will write articles about FinchLab, the FinchLab Next Gen Edition, and BioHDF.

Stay tuned...