The Long Read Club at #AGBT19

A Wellcome Trust supported effort, The Long Read Club seeks to resurrect a time-honored tradition: protocol development

After a long 5 days away from home and work and the routines that surround it, attending AGBT (and likewise other major conferences) is a tremendous amount of work. I was teasing a division lead for a major vendor at AGBT that I had saw them three times, which was remarkable as I may only see a person in a similar role only once, as the rest of the five days they are consumed with private meetings and other engagements.

Thus it was with Nick Loman, who in the past (looking it up it was at #AGBT16) has presented very interesting work on field sequencing using Oxford Nanopore. I didn’t see him the entire five days in Marco Island, for sure everyone is busy.

The Long Read Club

I was pleased to first hear about the Long Read Club in Dr. Adam Phillippy’s (NHGRI) great talk titled “Telomere-to-telomere assembly of a complete human X chromosome” (I may write about this topic next). He wore a shirt and gave an acknowledgement to Nick Loman (@pathogenomenick) and Matt Loose (@mattloose) at the end of his talk.

Video at an event is not easy

Nick and Matt took time out to produce a video at Marco Island and publish it on February 28^th. (For those who were at AGBT, this was Thursday, the first full day of the conference.) As one who has done plenty of videos while at Thermo Fisher Scientific and two from Pillar Scientific (here’s a playlist of the video interviews up on Youtube if you are interested – all 79 of them) it is not an easy task to record, edit, proof and then publish video content during an event.

While on the topic of video, Nanostring was able to catch me talking about spatial profiling and put up a video over on LinkedIn here.

The Long Read Club was able to record Matt interviewing Nick, was able to put on the whale branding and subtitles, and get two different cameras to get some variety. This isn’t easy, although newer software does make the process easier, and you can see the finished product here.

Protocol development and the Long Read Club

One interesting point Nick brings out is that in the 1980’s it was common for laboratories to develop and share their own protocols, before vendors started developing and coming out with their own kits and methods for scientists to work on their experiments rather than protocols. While commercial efforts for long-read sample preparation are starting to emerge (GenomeWeb Premium link, subscription required), the Long Read Club wants scientists who have developed protocols for long-read sequencing to contribute.

The Long Read Club plans to have additional YouTube episodes highlighting such contributed protocols; Nick asks for presentations and protocols (to be uploaded to Protocol.io).

Sign up for email and subscribe

At AGBT the Long Read Club had T-shirts and stickers; funded by a grant from Wellcome Trust, the website is here, the sign-up for email updates is here, and you can subscribe to their Youtube channel here.