21st Annual International Meeting on Microbial Genomes (Lake Arrowhead)

The meeting page for the 21st Annual International Meeting on Microbial Genomes at Lake Arrowhead is now up.  This has been one of my favorite meetings for many many years (full disclosure — I am now a co-organizer and have been for the last few meetings).  Note — the meeting is NOT just about genomes — it includes many related topics including just about anything about sequencing (e.g. microbiome studies) and/or microbial *omics.

September 18 – 22, 2016.

Summary:

This conference is part of a yearly meeting initiated in 1991 to bring together genome sequencers, bioinformatics specialists, biologists, and geneticists, to forge interactions that would result in meaningful functional genomics.  The goal of the meeting is to translate the influx of new genome sequencing information into useful biological studies.

The Lake Arrowhead 2016 meeting will have a major focus on microbial communities, the human microbiome, pathogens, and genome evolution.  The field of genomics has reached the point where deriving the sequence of an organism’s entire genome is now seen as a beginning rather than an endpoint.  The sequence itself is a powerful tool to guide further studies to achieve an understanding of the organism’s biology.  This understanding requires either a detailed genetic analysis, or more rapid methods for developing functional genomics.

Therefore, this years meeting will cover micro-organisms for which extensive analyses exist, and those for which new biological and technical strategies are being developed.  The focus on biodiversity, the human microbiome, pathogenic organisms, and bioenergentics adds special significance to this meeting.  This meeting is designed to have a mix of invited presentations and poster sessions.  The meeting will have approximately 150 participants.

Some details:

• Program still in development. Working on having a session on the built environment possibly but still a work in progress.
• Confirmed speakers.
• Registration.
• Sponsors.

For information about past meetings see the following:

• Blog post of mine from just before the 2014 meeting: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting #LAMG14
• Storify from 2014 meeting
• 2014 meeting wrap up on microBEnet