During Tuesday morning’s plenary session, Stanford University’s Stephen Quake, who co-founded Fluidigm and Helicos BioSciences, discussed what the biological analog of the integrated circuit would be, and his lab’s work toward single-cell genetic and genomic analyses and direct deterministic phasing. Then, during a new workshop on systems genomics, researchers discussed ways genomic tools are being put to use to study organisms like medicago and rice. In particular, the University of California, Davis’ Pamela Ronald noted that her lab is using such tools to study biotic stress response in rice.
Then at the Pacific Biosciences workshop, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Michael Schatz discussed ways to assemble reads generated on the company’s RS machine, while Davis’ Simon Chan talked about his work to analyze more than 250 publicly available shotgun sequences to study centromeres. Later, Monsanto’s Todd Michael and the USDA’s Tad Sonstegard received Illumina’s Agricultural Greater Good Initiative award for their work on baobab and goats, respectively.