Plant and Animal Genomes (PAG) 32 Conference Recap
Genomes rule! Especially when they're not from humans ;)
Hello! I got back from the Plant and Animal Genomes 32, a week-long conference on — you guessed it — plant and animal genomes! The focus is on feeding the world through more nutritious crops and resource-efficient agriculture, but there’s more basic science as well.
I had a talk and poster (PDF links on Figshare) and got great feedback on our methods, potential users, and tools to benchmark against.
Talks I liked
There were many talks, but here are a few sessions I enjoyed:
Day 1 (Friday):
Day 2 (Saturday):
Aquaculture discussed NCBI’s resources for annotating genomes with their new “datasets” tool and single-cell RNA-seq of catfish spleen (B cell development).
I appreciated the discussion of how Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiments were the best experiments ever done in the Comparative Genomics session by Shifeng Cheng (AGIS, CAAS).
Day 3 (Sunday):
The Computational Genome Decoding was kind of spicy, with every speaker claiming their method was better than the previous one.
I love learning about the protein sequences and annotations in the UniProt Database!
Day 4 (Monday)
PacBio’s HiFi session had great talks about the additional information gained from high-quality genomes for fish and the ambitious Earth Biogenome Project to sequence all planet biodiversity.
PacBio had a great party that night!
Day 5 (Tuesday)
By day 5 I was drained, but my talk was on day 5, so I still had to bring the energy!
The Plenary session about creating Vitamin D-rich tomatoes to supplement diets was cool! Apparently tomatoes already make a compound similar to Vitamin D, so the engineering wasn’t too bad.
The Bioinformatics session featured the legendary Sergey Koren presenting recent advances in full telomere-to-telomere human genomes and their application to other organisms. I appreciated the cautionary tale of sketching with only canonical DNA k-mers, leading to uncovered k-mer deserts in the genome.
The Proteomics session had talks about comparative eggshell development in chickens/ducks/pigeons/parrots and making less allergenic gluten in wheat through molecular dynamics protein structure simulations.
Day 6 (Wednesday)
The plenary session on scalable plant genome editing discussed the GMO label and how manufacturers avoid engineered food because consumers want the “butterfly” non-GMO label. I asked why the industry doesn’t brand precision-engineered food as higher nutrition, no pesticides, and more flavor, (because that’s the reason I buy organic and local, if possible) and the speaker said consumers can’t tell the difference between an edit and a transgene, but I think they can. It’s fixing a typo vs inserting a whole paragraph. And we just had a worldwide education in mRNA vaccines! Maybe I’m naive, but I think it’s possible.
Wildlife Genomics had cool talks about the woolly mammoth genome, complex genomic structure in North African foxes (including the super-cute fennec fox), sequencing honeybees from Swedish museums to study species richness declines, genomics of sadly collapsing bird populations in Hawai’i, and the origins of sulfur-adapted fish in Mexico.
What I would have done differently
This was my first conference going completely solo, without fellow group members or coworkers, and had I known about it, I think I would have benefitted from PAG Mentorship Program. With over 3,000 attendees, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd at PAG! The mentorship program pairs first-timers at PAG with experienced attendees. They meet a few times on Zoom beforehand, have a breakfast at the meeting, and stay in touch throughout the event. I might have seen it when I was signing up, but arrogantly thought “oh I’ve been to conferences before.” I thought it was for people who hadn’t been to many conferences and I felt like I was fine. However, since I was going solo, I didn’t know many people, and I would have benefited from joining a group.
I learned about the program from the organizer of the PAG mentorship program, Mónica Muñoz Torres (LinkedIn) at lunch on the last day, who espoused its benefits! It made me think it would have been helpful to join a group like that.
Overall
It was a great conference, and I hope to be back at PAG33 next year with new results!
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