Todd's Blog

I see this morning that Craig Venter passed away yesterday. See the press release from JCVI for more. I never met Venter, but he had a massive influence on my career (believe it or not). As I recall the story, Venter basically sparked the genome revolution with his idea for a "shotgun" approach to genome sequencing. The E.coli genome project at the time was doing a map and sequence technique, where they basically stepped along the genome and sequenced one part at a time. Venter saw this as a huge inefficiency and said that we ought to just break a bacterial genome into lots of pieces, sequence a bunch of them, then let a computer reconstruct the complete chromosome from the sequenced fragments. Venter's plan required eight times as much sequencing as the E.coli project, but Venter expected that the cost of sequencing would come down (which it did) and the speed improvement would be HUGE (which it was). NSF reviewers were skeptical of the plan, but he did some proof-of-...

Yes, we are having the Origins conference this year!  The conference is scheduled for July 12-15 at the Master's University in Santa Clarita, CA.  This year, we're having a kickoff session on Sunday evening after dinner, and then we'll have our regular technical presentations on Monday and Tuesday.  Wednesday is a field trip to Vasquez Rocks. Tickets are already on sale, along with an option for campus housing.  As always, the regular ticket includes all the presentations and meals for the conference, along with the fieldtrip.  We're also looking for abstract submissions, so if you've been working on a project, we'd like to hear about it.  The abstract format is different this year.  We decided to cut back to just 300 words with no references or bibliography, and we're asking everyone to submit through our website. Visit coresci.org/origins for all the conference details and information on how to submit your abstract.  We'll be updating regularl...