We’ve been pretty quiet here at Genomes Unzipped for the last couple of weeks, while many of us prepared for and attended the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Washington DC last week. The meeting was (as usual) an exhausting barrage of presentations on human genetics; you can get a flavour of the new results presented either by scrolling back through the Twitter coverage, or reading the summary posts by Luke Jostins (who found himself explaining why Eric Lander was wrong about epistasis and missing heritability) and Larry Parnell. Shirley Wu also has an excellent recap of the meeting, including an analysis of the Twitter coverage.
My overall impression of the meeting – and this was a view shared by many other attendees I’ve spoken to – was that 2010 was a year of transition. The numbers were impressive: Stacy Gabriel at the Broad Institute blithely reported that their pipeline is now theoretically capable of sequencing up to 800 exomes (complete sequence of the protein-coding regions of the genome) per week, and the 1000 Genomes Project has now completed sequencing of over 1,000 whole genomes at low coverage. Projects that would have seemed mind-blowing even a year ago seem almost mundane now, an indication of just how fast sequencing technology has moved in the last twelve months.
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