Genome informatics advances in theory and practice.docVIP

Fu and Horton Genome Medicine 2010, 2:7 /content/2/1/7 MEE TING REPORT Genome informatics: advances in theory and practice Szu-chin Fu* and Paul Horton* Edward Wijaya (AIST Computational Biology Research Abstract Center, Tokyo, Japan) presented RECOUNT, a program A report on the 20th International Conference on Genome Informatics, Yokohama, Japan, 14-16 December 2009. to correct transcriptome sequence read counts by sub- tracting counts that are likely to be the product of sequencing errors. RECOUNT is an e?cient implemen- tation of the Expectation Maximization algorithm of Bei?barth et al. that can process large next-generation sequencer datasets. Wijaya showed that the method can Introduction In December 2009, 323 people from 11 countries increase the proportion of mappable tags and, more attended the 20th annual International Conference on importantly, avoid some false inferences of expression Genome Informatics, also known as ‘GIW’ from its former moniker, the ‘Genome Informatics Workshop’. that would be made with uncorrected data. GIW is both a venerable and a timely conference. Sequence analysis Venerable because it boasts an almost 20 year history as a In his keynote address, Sean Eddy (Howard Hughes venue to report advances in bioinformatics - yet also Medical Institute Janelia Farm Research Campus, timely as we head into the era of personal genomics. e Ashburn, USA) introduced HMMER3, a major update to authors of this report are a similar mixture; one of us is his popular HMMER software package for hidden fortunate to have the distinction of presenting at the very Markov model-based search and analysis of similar ?rst GIW, while the other can see things with fresher protein sequences. His two main points were that eyes. Together