Applied Bioinformatics & Public Health Microbiology: 15 – 17 May 2013

The awesome ABPHM meeting is back in 2013! This is a really nice conference that I am very happy to help organise. It's a bit different from other public health microbiology conferences in that it specifically aims to bring together public health microbiologists and epidemiologists with bioinformaticians. Once we have everyone in the same room, we try and understand what each other does a little better!

High-throughput sequencing has been high on the agenda for the past few meetings, I expect this to be the case again. However I expect this meeting will start focus on practical and logistical aspects of getting WGS of bacterial isolates into the microbiology lab for routine usage for hospital and community outbreak tracing and surveillance of important pathogens.

The last meeting in 2011 was notable for taking place right in the middle of the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in Germany, and BGI released reads from an isolate that triggered the crowd-sourcing initiative during the meeting!

My job on the committee, alongside Jon Green from the HPA is to try and represent for the bioinformaticians, and so I am really pleased that we have a couple of high-profile international speakers who know their way around a bash shell: Aaron Darling, of Mauve/progressiveMauve fame (until recently of Jonathan Eisen's lab) will be talking about his tools and work as will Torsten Seemann, author of incredibly useful assembly tools including VelvetOptimiser.

Julian Parkhill and Sharon Peacock will both be speaking about their current work, always something to look forward to.

Also of note is that Oxford Nanopore and Illumina are sponsoring the meeting!

If you do bioinformatics for infectious disease outbreaks or public health surveillance, I strongly recommend you register. Also put in an abstract (deadline 20th March!) as we like to select many talks from submissions. It is a unique grouping of people and the talks are always good. This time it will be held at the Moller Centre which is near Cambridge city centre rather than in Hinxton. It's a really nice venue, and it means that instead of heading to the Red Lion, this time we can take an out-trip to The Eagle and perhaps also The Panton Arms.

Head over to the event website for the agenda and the registration form.