Beyond the Genome 2010

The true gene count, human evolution and disease genomics

Joseph B. Martin Conference Center,
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts
11th – 13th October 2010

This international conference brought together leading researchers and industry representatives who reviewed recent progress in key areas of post-genomic research in biology and medicine and charted future developments, including the Human Microbiome Project and the resequencing of matched tumour and normal genomes from specific types of cancers. A cloud computing workshop, open to all delegates, provided an exciting opportunity to discuss recent and forthcoming developments in this critical and fast-moving field with policy makers and commercial and academic representatives of the genomics community and cloud platforms.

All abstracts presented at the conference can be viewed at the Genome Biology website.

Why Beyond the Genome 2010?

• An internationally renowned scientific organizing committee and invited speakers.
• Workshop on cloud computing in genomics and bioinformatics, open to all delegates.
• All participants were invited to submit abstracts for oral and poster presentations. A significant number of talks were selected from registrants.
• Technology showcase: presentations of cutting-edge research informed by state-of-the-art technologies.
• Highly topical scientific program: from basic research to translational genomic medicine, including cancer resequencing and the human microbiome projects.
• A free one year personal subscription to Genome Biology and its new sister publication Genome Medicine.

Attendees:

This event was a must-attend for all: Postdoctoral research fellows; Graduate students; Principal investigators in academia and industry; Clinical researchers working in medical genomics.

Topics included:

• Sequencing cancer genomes
• How much of the Genome is functional
• Microbiomes in human and other environments
• Insights from genomic analyses into evolution
• Cloud computing in genomics and bioinformatics (workshop)

The cloud computing workshop at ‘Beyond the Genome 2010’ comprised a series of talks and interactive sessions:

Part 1: The novel cloud platform

• The cloud platform – paradigm, security, data transfer and limitations
• Using commercial clouds for bioinformatics
• Private clouds

Part 2: Parallel sessions with different foci

• Session 1: Getting on to the cloud and analyzing sequence data in the cloud
• Session 2: Using CLOVR for bioinformatics purposes
• Session 3: Seeing real technical challenges and limitations of the cloud platform

Part 3: Real world examples

• Assembly in the cloud
• The Galaxy workflow system
• Argonne Workflow Engine (AWE) - scaling applications inside the cloud

Part 4: Round table

• Panel table discussion

Chair: Folker Meyer, Argonne National Laboratory, USA

Participants included:

• Vivien Bonazzi, NHGRI, USA
• Titus Brown, Michigan State University, USA
• Chris Dagdigian, Bioteam, Boston
• Narayan Desai, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
• Florian Fricke, University of Maryland School of Medicine, USA
• Bob Grossmann, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
• Rob Knight, University of Colorado, USA
• Mike Schatz, CSHL, USA
• James Taylor, Galaxy, USA
• Lincoln Stein, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA
   

General enquiries

Email:  events@biomedcentral.com

UK call:  0800 389 8136

Outside UK call:  +44 (0) 20 3192 2009