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ASHG 2008 Kicks off

Last night the American Society of Human Genetics meeting started in Philadelphia and kicked off with a crowded mixer featuring classic Philly fare (hoagies and pretzels). I asked Aravinda Chakravarti what he thought the major themes of the meeting would be. He said he was glad to report that the field has moved slightly away from data to new ideas. New ideas including better understanding of the genetic structure of disease and the characterization and understanding of the meaning of structure in the genome, including copy number variations (a term that appears in the abstract book more than 200 times). That’s not to say that data have taken a back seat. It’s no secret that the data are pouring out from new sequencing technologies. Illumina staged a brief press conference featuring the three papers appearing last week in Nature that presented four new full human genome sequences, those of an Asian individual, an African individual and one from a woman and from the cancer that she eventually died from.
Stay tuned for most posts from the field, and possibly some guest posts.

Posted by Brendan Maher on November 12, 2008
Categories: American Society of Human Genetics | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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One or two of the Life Scientists' group on Friend Feed are there, Brendan, see
http://friendfeed.com/e/f8758014-ba51-4023-ae92-1a8a231bca49/Anyone-planning-to-be-at-ASHG-in-Philly-next-week/
Enjoy the meeting!
Maxine.

Posted by: Maxine | November 12, 2008 05:56 PM

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