UK Genome Science Meeting 2013 - Meeting report

UK Genome Science Meeting: 2^nd-4^th September 2013

Following on from the success of the previous 3 years’ UK Next Generation Sequencing meetings, the 2013 UK Genome Science Meeting reached even greater heights when it was held at the Jubilee Campus of the University of Nottingham for the 4^th year running. The meeting was attended by a capacity audience of 250 delegates from institutions from all over the UK with a number of European invited speakers also attending. This year the meeting concentrated more on the biological discoveries made in the field of Genome Science rather than the technological and bioinformatic advancements bias of previous years.

Clive Brown, the Chief Technology Officer of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, kicked off proceedings on the Monday afternoon with a much-anticipated keynote address to a packed lecture theatre in which he updated the audience on the very latest developments in the field of nanopore sequencing. 

After a couple of parallel sessions on Metagenomics and Bioinformatics, Mark Caulfield, Chief Scientist of the newly formed Genomics England, ended the first day with a plenary lecture outlining the plans for the recently announced 100k genome initiative which plans to perform whole genome sequencing of 100,000 English NHS patients who have been identified as suffering from various forms of cancer and other genetic disorders.

Parallel sessions were again run the following morning, with sessions on the “Clinical and Immunological Applications of NGS” and “Evolutionary Genomics”.  After a lunchtime poster session, the talks reconvened with two more parallel sessions:   “Pathogens and Microbes” and “Gene Expression”. A delicious conference dinner held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the centre of Nottingham brought the day to an end.

The final day started with sessions on “Evolving Technologies” and “Agrifoods” running in parallel. At the final lunchtime poster session, TGAC’s Dharanya Sampath won the student poster prize with a poster on exome sequencing and variant discovery in barley, while University of Nottingham’s Harriet Johnson was awarded the runner-up prize for her poster on “Expression-RAD Sequencing in the Pond Snail Lymnaea stagnalis”.

The meeting ended on the Wednesday afternoon with the conclusion of the “Evolving Technologies” session and a parallel session of “Miscellaneous Additional Talks”.

We would like to thank all of our numerous sponsors for their generous support, without which the great success of this meeting would not have been possible. Next year, the 2014 UK Genome Science meeting will be held at Oxford University from 2^nd-4^th September.