It’s February on the calendar and it is pretty cold here in the Mid-Atlantic so that means it must be time for our annual trek to Marco Island, FL for the AGBT meeting. The conference is a highlight on an increasingly crowded meeting calendar in the genomics community. This will be the 14^th installment of the AGBT Meeting and I am happy to say I have been to all except for the very first one. The meeting organizer, Rita Dunton of G Corp, has done an amazing job over the years of keeping everyone happy while running a top-flight scientific retreat. This year the organizers implemented a new registration system to try and make sure industry, academic, and government had equal representation after the registration the two previous years was sold-out within the first ten minutes of being open.

Well, it was a whirlwind few days at AGBT, where the talks were great and the after-parties pretty spectacular in their own right. This is my quick summary of some of the highlights of the conference. (DISCLAIMER -  I had to leave the conference early Saturday morning so I am unable to review any of the speakers or parties from Saturday).

Where to begin…?

Life Tech

As always, Jonathan Rothberg did not disappoint and delivered some pretty bold statements about where they are heading with the Proton.

Some highlights:

Here's an update from the conference. As always, AGBT lives up to its reputation. Wednesday evening's festivities were spot on with a personal highlight of being on board the Ion Torrent bus. Designed to be a rolling lab, it is a unique way to highlight the PGM, from form factor to actually doing a run on an instrument on the bus while the bus was parked on the beach...

I am currently writing from 30,000 feet as I make my annual pilgrimage to the AGBT conference in Marco Island, FL. I am fortunate in that I have been a regular attendee of this conference and have lived with it through its growth from tiny little rival conference (in the eyes of the very large GSAC meetings of the day) to a conference that now sold out within three minutes of opening their registration! Much has happened during that time, the announcement of the “completion” of the draft of the Human genome, the corresponding lull that followed and then the renewed excitement that 454 brought with the first next-gen sequencer.