Genomes 2008, Paris

Greetings from the 'Genomes 2008' conference, this year being held at the Institut Pasteur, Paris.

The conference so far has had an interesting mix of talks, covering a wide range of bugs, from human and plant pathogens to insect endosymbionts, and even a talk on viral photosynthesis! Genomics has been covered in the forms of whole genome sequencing, with particular reference to next-generation platforms such as 454 and Solexa, plus metagenomics, comparative genomics, plus many talks on functional genomics.

A highlight of the first day was Martin Glaser's talk on the interactions between Helicobacter pylori and the human stomach. He presented some fascinating associations betweeen Helicobacter negative, and particularly cagA negative popluations and the increasing incidence of non-cardia malignancies such as oesophageal cancer. He went on to suggest that the decreasing incidence of Helicobacter infection-- which he suggested was becoming extinct in the developed world-- may not all be good news. He presented an additional association with early-onset asthma with cag negative populations, which raised some interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between humans and Helicobacter, a relationship which has been going 50,000 years and might be coming to an end.

Look out here for more posts on Genomes 2008.

Today we are looking forward to seeing George Weinstock talk about the human metagenome project. Earlier, Julian Parkhill presented some interesting results on Salmonella typhi sequencing with next-generation sequencing technology.

Today Mark Pallen, of xBASE will be talking on E. coli genomics and we will be announcing a new developing for the xBASE project entitled 'My xBASE', aimed at exploiting next-generation sequencing data in a fast and user-friendly manner.