'Omics for all — genomic technology conference

The AGTA conference, Australia’s foremost genomic technology conference, is an essential event for researchers and industry representatives who work with genomic technologies in a variety of contexts including platform development, medical genomics, functional genomics, non-model systems, epigenomics and plant genomics.

• What: 16th annual conference of the Australasian Genomic Technologies Association (AGTA) and the 8th Annual New Zealand Next Generation Sequencing Conference (NZ NGS)
• When: 9–12 October 2016
• Where: Pullman Hotel, Auckland, New Zealand
• Registration: www.agtaconference.org/registration
• More information: www.agtaconference.org

The conference also offers an important opportunity for computational biologists, bioinformaticians and data visualisation specialists to interact with technologists and biologists. This unique mix is one of the reasons that the Australian genomics community has a dynamic cross-disciplinary and innovative approach to genomic analysis, and is at the forefront of analysis tools for new types of ‘omics’ data.

AGTA/NZ NGS 2016 will attract staff and clients from all genomics core service providers in the region, and beyond, eager to be exposed to new and evolving technologies, and to hear how those technologies are being applied to genomics research.

AGTA/NZ NGS 2016 will showcase dynamic cross-discipline-omics research and uniquely allow genomics and bioinformatics researchers, as well as industry, to interact over a wide range of topics; these will include technologies focused on genome regulation: biology, phenotype and utility, genomics and agriculture, genome diversity and evolution, human disease and clinical genomics, plant genomics, microbial and single cell genomics and transcriptomics.

Speaker highlights

The session organisers have invited scientists at the cutting edge of integrative -omics research to present keynote lectures at the conference who will cover topics such as crowdfunded genomics, space missions, cancer, brain development, undiagnosed genetic disorders and the metagenomics of New York City.

Keynote speakers include:

• Associate Professor Beth Shapiro — University of California Santa Cruz, USA
• Associate Professor Christopher Mason — Cornell University, USA
• Associate Professor Huaijun Zhou — University of California, USA
• Associate Professor Lance Miller — Wake Forest School of Medicine, USA
• Dr Richard Edward Green — University of California Santa Cruz, USA
• Professor Gregory Gibson — Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Professor Piero Carninci — RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies, Japan

Preconference workshops

Two preconference workshops will be held on Sunday, 9 October:

• Bisulfite sequencing: Genomewide methylation sequencing
• Metagenomics: Understanding microbial communities with next-generation sequencing

Delegates can register to attend these workshops when they register to attend the conference.

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