Events

The Ontario Genomics Institute (OGI) and The Centre for Applied Genomics (TCAG) co-hosted a Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) symposium entitled SOLiD approaches to ILLUMINAting the FLXible nature of Nucleic Acids in the MaRS auditorium on February 16, 2010.  The objective was to showcase the excellent research being performed using all the next generation sequencing platforms available in Ontario.  All the major players in the NGS space ( Illumina, Life Technologies, Roche and Helicos) were in attendance. 

Three NGS companies (Illumina, Life Technologies, Roche) provided sponsorship money to support the event.  In addition, Partek and Genomatix, two bioinformatics software providers each provided sponsorship support in order  to be in attendance at the event and provide a  half day of training/overview of their software.

As part of this event, on the day following the symposium, the computer training rooms at Sickkids (~40 people) were booked for “hands on” bioinformatics training on end-user friendly vendor supplied NGS data analysis tools (Partek and Genomatix).  Due to the overwhelming demand for these training tools (111 for Partek and 133 for Genomatix) the “hands on” training was cancelled to facilitate getting more people introduced to each of these tools.

For a copy of the final agenda please click here. 

Outcomes:

The symposium was very successful, with 286 people registering.  Attendees were from all over Ontario, with great representation from Ottawa, London and Hamilton.  Feedback on the event has been extremely positive regarding the importance of educating researchers on the various NGS platforms, the challenges with each of the technologies and the bottlenecks associated with data analysis on the various platforms.  What became apparent throughout the day was where the bottleneck truly lies: data analysis in a timely fashion. 

The bioinformatics overviews also proved to be very successful, and Partek has committed to returning with a mobile classroom (20 laptop computers with Partek software preloaded) to do hands on training in Toronto, London and Ottawa.  This should generate interest from other vendors (clc bio, Softgenetics etc.) to do the same.

OGI followed-up with all attendees on their bioinformatics needs by focusing on a targeted list and issuing a bioinformatics needs survey.