2024 ASM NGS Conference Session Topics

Epidemiological Cues: NGS in Clinical and Public Health Microbiology  

Genomic sequencing and molecular epidemiology are indispensable tools for clinical reference diagnostics, public health surveillance outbreak detection and response. This session will discuss how sequencing is being used in clinical and public health microbiology and the challenges and successes in implementing these technologies successfully in routine and standard practice. 

Bridging Silos: Exploring Mechanisms for Collecting and Sharing Microbial Genomic Data for Fostering Interoperability. 

Amassing large microbial genomic datasets has become turnkey. However, collecting rich contextual data, getting these datasets submitted to public or private repositories and extracting slices of these data across projects for broader analyses is still a barrier for advancing this field. This session will explore methods for improving contextual data and creating more interoperability between datasets and repositories. 

Secret Ingredient: NGS to Uncover the Role of Microbes in Agricultural and Food Systems

Understanding microbial diversity and function in natural and built environments is critical for enhancing productivity, resilience and health of agricultural and food systems. NGS can uncover the role of microbes in soil, plant and animal health. It can also help pinpoint the origins of contamination events, antimicrobial resistance and other pathogen risks. This session will highlight genomic and microbiome research in environmental, veterinary and food microbiology.    

Microbial Chatter: Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease 

Profiling microbial communities and their functional potential in human and animal hosts is critical to our understanding of host-microbe interactions in health and disease. This session will highlight omics approaches to characterize the microbiome and virome in human and animal studies, as well as novel integrative and interaction network analysis methods. This session will also include studies on pathogen genomics.

Pipe Dreams: Analytical Methods, Bioinformatic Tools and Pipelines 

Recent technology advances have made whole-genome sequencing and other sequencing-based assays ubiquitous in modern microbiology. However, this shift in techniques is generating huge volumes of data that require computational analysis. This session covers new analytical methods and bioinformatics tools designed to surf the growing wave of genomic data.
 

Post-Conference Session

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Post-Conference Workshop

Wednesday, Oct. 16, 12:30-5 p.m. ET

This workshop aims to familiarize participants with the tools and components featured in NCBI’s Pathogen Detection Browser and the NCBI Pathogen Detection dataset available on Google Cloud. Attendees will gain insights into the functionality of the Pathogen Detection pipeline, techniques for accessing the data via web interfaces and Google Cloud and proficiency in downloading and executing example analyses utilizing cloud-based data resources.
 

View the conference sessions and other events using our Schedule-at-a-Glance