Keynote Speaker Harriet Dashnow, Ph.D: “I loved hearing about the incredible breadth of long-read research going on in Seattle,"
More than 150 researchers, faculty, and staff gleaned new insights into the effectiveness and potential clinical application of long-read sequencing at the fourth annual symposium organized by the UW Medicine Brotman Baty Institute. It was held on October 26 at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute.
“This year’s symposium built on the successes of the past and took our annual event to a new level regarding the insights and knowledge presented, as well as the support from the sponsors,” said Danny Miller, M.D., Ph.D., the UW Assistant Professor, who leads BBI’s Long-Read Sequencing Program.
Those sponsors were: Illumina, Nabsys, Integra Biosciences, Twist Bioscience, PacBio, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
This year’s symposium also included featured speakers for outside the Puget Sound region for the first time:
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Runhang Shu, a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California, Irvine;. He presented on “Single-virus ultra-long DNA sequencing reveals genome rearrangement and CRISPR-like array in DNA packaging of a transposable phage.”
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Harriet Dashnow, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz, who served as the symposium’s keynote speaker. Her topic was “Spanning is only the start: Tandem repeat mutation in the long-read era.”
Following the day-long symposium, Dashnow commented on what she learned.
“I loved hearing about the incredible breadth of long-read research going on in Seattle,” she said. “I learned about fiber-seq, a cool chromatin accessibility technique, and amazing diversity of LINE-1 retrotransposons, many of which are still active today.”
When asked about what new information or insights she acquired that she will use in her research, Dashnow said, “I was really excited by the computational methods that Christopher Seward presented.”
Seward is a Staff Research Scientist at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute. He spoke on “Measuring X-chromosome inactivation skew from tandem repeats and epigenetics in long-read genomes (XCITE).”
“He described XCITE to measure X-chromosome inactivation skew from long-reads and SV-XCI to phase specific structural variants to that X-inactivation skew,” Dashnow said. “This allows us to figure out if a specific variant is biasing skew through selection during development, or to identify cases where phenotypic differences are a result of skew. I’m excited to try it out on our data!”
Miller said he expects to begin planning the 2027 symposium over the coming weeks.
“I appreciated having such an array of local speakers from the UW, Fred Hutch, Seattle Children’s, and the Pacific Northwest Research Institute, who were augmented by Drs. Dashnow and Shu,” he said. “Everyone benefits from the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives.”
