Thursday, November 29, 2018

YAMMMM: Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting - Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit 2019

Uggh. In the middle of a faculty retreat and saw a Tweet about this meeting and could not help looking at their speaker list. And am not impressed.  Too many male speakers.

Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit 2019
A Meeting to Hear Men (81%) Not Women (19%) Discussing Microbiota*, **
YAMMMM: Yet Another Mostly Male Microbiome Meeting

Gail A. Hecht, MD, MS, Loyola University Medical Center (U.S.)
Jack A. Gilbert, PhD, University of Chicago (U.S.)
Session Moderator: Giovanni Barbara, MD, University of Bologna (Italy)
Suzanne Devkota, PhD, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (U.S.)
Magnus Simren, MD, PhD, AGAF, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)
Christoph Thaiss, PhD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)
Session Moderator: Purna Kashyap, MBBS, Mayo Clinic
Eric Martens, PhD, University of Michigan (U.S.)
Liping Zhao, PhD, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (U.S.)
Paul Cotter, PhD, University College Cork (Ireland)
Robert Britton, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine (U.S.)
Joseph Zackular, PhD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)
Premysl Bercik, MD, McMaster University (Canada)
Dirk Haller, PhD, Technical University of Munich (Germany)
Eran Elinav, MD, PhD, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel)
Karine Clément, MD, PhD, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (France)
Alexander Khoruts, MD, University of Minnesota (U.S.)
Diane Hoffmann, JD, MS, University of Maryland (U.S.)
Francisco Guarner, MD, PhD, University Hospital Vall d’Hebron (Spain)
Dylan Dodd, PhD, Stanford University (U.S.)
Stanley L. Hazen, MD, PhD, Cleveland Clinic (U.S.)
Rohit Loomba, MD, University of California, San Diego (U.S.)
Gary D. Wu, MD, University of Pennsylvania (U.S.)
Session Moderator: Hania Szajewska, MD, Medical University of Warsaw (Poland)
Purna Kashyap, MBBS, Mayo Clinic (U.S.)
Geoffrey Preidis, MD, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine (U.S.)
Pinaki Panigrahi, University of Nebraska (U.S.)

* Gender inferred by Google Searches, looking at personal websites, and some guessing
** Assuming just M:F genders which is clearly a bad assumption

Saturday, November 03, 2018

Pumpkin Carving as a model for Genome Assembly

So - we have this pumpkin carving contest every year in the UC Davis Genome Center.  And people from my lab have done some excellent pumpkins in the past.

See for example some details on their 2014 pumpkin:






And I have on and off carved pumpkins on sciency themes every once in a while.




So this year, when the Genome Center admins sent around an email saying they had bought pumpkins for people to use, I decided it would be fun to do something this year.  But then 10/30 came and we had still not done anything.

So I came up with a crazy idea.  Cut up pumpkins in different ways as an example of genome sequencing strategies.  And, with the help of a few people in my lab and some of the people in neighboring labs, this is what we did.

So - first - we took three pumpkins.

And we decided to make one of them a representation of long read sequencing and another a representative of short read sequencing.  So - using a saw provided by people in Justin Siegel's lab, I cut one pumpkin into horizontal slices and remove the innards and made that the "long read sequencing" example.  And then I took pumpkin #2 and again cut into horizontal slices but this time I  then cut those slices up into chunks.  And we then stored the pumpkin pieces overnight and Katie Dahlhausen in my lab made some nice signs to add to the display. In addition, the decorated pumpkin #3 with some "Shotgun sequencing" motifs.  And voila, we had our pumpkins ready for the contest for 10/31.

So I headed in to work early, and set up our display.





And I posted about it to Twitter.


But something seemed lacking.  So I went and got another pumpkin


And now it felt complete.

And then, after the symposium I decided - hey - we should try to reassemble these.  I took some pics of this and made them into videos / gifs.
Long piece assembly. 

Assembling the long piece pumpkin shotgun was easy.



Linking assembly.

Assembling from the linking pieces was harder.  And in the end we did not quite get it back together.




We did not even try to assemble the small pieces. But the next day I did ponder recovering them and the other pieces and doing a meta pumpkin assembly.


Anyway - this ended up being pretty fun.  Lots of ideas about how to do it better (e.g., we should have barcoded / labelled the pieces so that we could guide the assembly if we failed to do it without guidance).   And thanks to all the discussions with people out there and to the people in my lab who helped put this all together.

Also I made a Wakelet of some of the Twitter discussion

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