It is funny how I think taking a vacation will recharge my battery pack, but a break usually leaves me completely empty. It actually takes me a couple of weeks of work to recharge. For the holidays I went to Colombia, so I have been in recharging mode for the last couple of weeks. I had a good transition though, since on my way back I spent a week in San Diego. Not for fun but to give a talk in a science conference; a great experience!
During grad school we usually attend 1 or 2 conferences per year. These are great venues to meet peers working in similar issues, gather new ideas, get updates on our field and even get inspired. During these conferences there are plenary sessions as well as workshops that may run simultaneously. This means that we actually have to study the program before hand to catch the best talks.
There are also networking events, which are a bit challenging since we tend to fall upon people we already know. At the meeting in San Diego someone even retweeted a blog about how 90% of scientists at conferences at desperate for a dinner invitation – we feel lonely and too shy to mingle.
This conference also had industry workshops and exhibitors so it was interesting to learn about new sequencing technologies and the growing numbers of biotech companies working on genomics. Nowadays services are tailored to every need and budget. For example, Illumina – one of the biggest sequencing companies based in San Diego, CA – offers a genotyping chip with 60,000 genetic markers. This is useful for species without much genomic information and resources. A group studying an African crop plant called cowpea used this chip, which works even when samples are left at room temperature and DNA is degraded. We usually use liquid nitrogen to freeze samples but it is difficult to implement this sampling technique in some field situations.
If the budget is higher – much much higher – Illumina offers a concierge service where they assign a project manager to sequence whole genomes of any number of individuals. The big issue here is that whole genomes produce tons of data that need to be stored. The number of servers is usually not enough and projects are constantly running out of space. New computer technologies and bioinformatics tools are being developed but they need to start catching the pace at which sequencing technologies are evolving.
Photo credits: Adriana Suarez