Tonight, I watched the London Calling 2024 studio interview about innovations in conservation and RNA in liquid biopsy. Zoe McDougall interviewed three researchers about conservation genomics and the accessibility of the technologies. Mrinalini Wasta from the San Diego Zoe Wildlife Alliance spoke about the challenges of taking samples from outside communities and involving partners. The […]
The London Calling 2024 virtual platform is no longer available! So, tonight, I started watching the available YouTube playlists. The first consists of studio interviews. I watched the “LC24 Studio: Understanding Structural Variation, Population Genomics” session. Zoe McDougall interviewed presenters. Belen de la Morena from the University of Murcia in Spain spoke about their interest […]
Tonight, I watched the London Calling 2024 session “CoRAL accurately resolves extrachromosomal DNA structures with long-read sequencing.” Matthew Jones from Stanford University was the presenter and spoke about their toolkit to study extrachromosomal (ecDNA) oncogene (focal) amplifications. ecDNA seems to be large (100 kb-50 Mb) circular and highly rearranged. Jones noted it is also rapidly […]
Oscar Enrique Torres Montaguth from the University College London in the UK presented at London Calling 2024 on “Genomic studies of adeno-associated virus hepatitis.” The team identified AAV2 in liver/blood samples of a pediatric hepatitis outbreak in 2022. These AAVs are commonly used as vectors in gene therapy, and hepatitis can occur with treatments. The […]
I have been curious about the title of a session from London Calling 2024: “Empowering scientists with data literacy skills in long-read genomic sequencing.” Katharina Wolff from TU Braunschweig in Germany was the presenter and explained the wide variety of plants and potential for genome sequencing. Wolf and the team wanted to enable students to […]
Mrinalini Watsa from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance presented at London Calling 2024 a session titled “Into the unknown: portable sequencing empowers global conservation genomics.” I believe Watsa presented at a previous London Calling. They spoke about biodiversity loss and how we likely don’t know the true diversity. Watsa presented examples of amphibian genomic […]
Continuing with the London Calling 2024 sessions available on demand, tonight I watched Carol Greider from the University of California, Santa Cruz, present on “Nanopore sequencing reveals conservation of chromosome end-specific telomere lengths.” Greider spoke about telomeres, DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes and their roles. Human telomeres consist of tandem repeats of a […]
Tonight, I watched Sarah Cameron from the University of Bath in the UK present at London Calling 2024 on “100 years of Bordetella pertussis evolution in the UK. I had watched a similar session and wanted to learn more. Cameron noted that in 2001, the whole-cell vaccine from 1957 was replaced with an acellular vaccine […]
Tonight, I started watching sessions from London Calling 2024! Rea Kobialka from the Institute of Animal Hygiene and Veterinary Public Health in Germany presented a session entitled “Mobile lab for rapid detection of pathogens in wastewater in sub-Saharan Africa.” They emphasized the importance of surveillance. The research team developed a portable suitcase mobile lab. The […]
Tonight, I watched a recent Oxford Nanopore Technologies video about plasmid sequencing. The title is “A new and improved ‘gold standard’ for complete plasmid verification.” This session was a Knowledge Exchange with Aaron Pomerantz, Segment Marketing Manager at ONT. They spoke about plasmids and their use in molecular biology and industrial processes. Sanger sequencing has […]










