The 2012 meeting of the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities opened Saturday evening in Orlando, Fla., with a keynote address from the University of Washington's Trisha Davis. In her talk, Davis discussed the evolution of the Yeast Resource Center at UW from its early days of taking a broad approach, to focusing its work, to then widening its offerings once again. Yeast is "good for technology development," she said.
Ram Sasisekharan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave Sunday morning's plenary talk, highlighting work he did to solve the puzzle of contaminated heparin that made its way into the drug supply in late 2007 and early 2008, causing a number of deaths before it was eventually recalled by Baxter Healthcare. Finding that the heparin was contaminated by oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, Sasisekharan and his colleagues developed an assay to monitor the drug's supply.
In a later Sunday session, the University of California, San Diego's Kun Zhang discussed his development of a padlock probe-based method of methylation sequencing, while Terry Kelly from the University of Southern California presented her new technique to map nucleosome positions and DNA methylation, called NOMe-seq, for nucleosome occupancy and methylome sequencing.