AGBT post #1.

I'm here.. and online. I almost didn't make it, thanks to bad weather in florida, but at least the car we rented didn't break down on the road, the way the other group's did. Apparently the police saved them from the aligators and wild pigs... No one can say AGBT hasn't been exciting, so far.

Anyhow, lots of good topics, and meeting interesting people already. (I'm even sitting beside an exec from Illumina, in the ABI sponsored lunch.. how's that for irony?) Anyhow, I'm excited to start the poster sessions and get some good discussions going.

Unfortunately, I missed two of the talks this morning, while I negotiated with the good people at United airlines to have my bag delivered. The three others I've seen so far have been good. Some interesting points:

The best graphics are the ones with the two DNA strands shown separately. Too cool - must include that in my FindPeaksToR scripts.

Loss or gain of homozygosity can screw up what you think you have, compared to what's really there. Many models assume you have only one copy of a gene, or just don't really do much to make sense of these events.

From David Cox, I learned that Barcoding isn't new (it's not), but that it usually doesn't work well (I can't prove that), but hey, they got it to work (and that's good!).

And yes, my favorite line from David Cox's presentation was something like: 900 PCR products, 90 people['s samples]... 1 tube. Make sure you don't drop it!

Anyhow, I'm getting lots of ideas, and I'm thoroughly enjoying this conference. I'm saturated in next-gen sequencing work.

Anyhow, if anyone else is reading this, My poster is #38... feel free come come by and talk.