A triumphant Eric Green took the podium this morning to officially kick off the ninth annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting here in Marco Island, Fla. Thanks to a burst of interest in sequencing technologies and the scientific applications they're enabling, this year's conference is some 30 percent bigger than its previous record, he told attendees. "There's a tremendous amount of large-scale sequencing" to be done, Eric said -- despite the feeling in previous years that sequencing was past its prime.