Stuart Catchpole, Head of Business Development & Communications at TGAC, said: “PAG provides a fantastic opportunity for us to raise awareness of TGAC and the world-class expertise that we have. The sheer number of leading scientists at the conference gives us the opportunity to meet new people and have exciting conversations about potential opportunities, as well as catching up with collaborators old and new. Our exhibition stand was a real hub of activity this year.”TGAC researchers were involved in a range of studies presented at the exhibition, from wheat to ash tree genomics. One of TGAC’s PhD students, Ricardo Ramirez-Gonzalez, was also awarded the IWGSC (International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium) Early Career Award for developing bioinformatics pipelines that can be used for wheat improvement using next-generation sequencing.

As part of the TGAC stand we offered a prize draw of £2500 of a sequencing project, we are delighted to congratulate Jared E. Decker as the winner of the competition. Jared is the Assistant Professor in Beef Genetics Extension and Computational Genomics at the University of Missouri. He is planning to use the cost discount for helping with this research in assisting breed associations and beef producers to understand and use genomic technologies in selection decisions.

TGAC researchers were involved in the following studies that were presented at PAG:

• Tilling for Disease Resistance Genes Ksenia Krasileva, Sarah Ayling, Paul Bailey

• One Plant - Multiple Genomes: Phasing Homeologs in Polyploid Wheat Ksenia Krasileva, Sarah Ayling, Paul Bailey

• Using the Wheat Tilling Database to Search Mutants of Interest Sarah Ayling, Paul Bailey, Ksenia Krasileva

• A New RNA-Seq Method Reveals Plant Defence Responses at Higher Resolution Walter Verweij, Matt Clark – see scientific poster here

• The Genome of Fraxinus excelsior (European ash) Bernardo Clavijo, David Swarbreck, Sarah Ayling, Mario Caccamo

• The Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes, Data Standards, Annotation and Sharing Mario Caccamo, Matt Clark, Federica Di-Palma, David Swarbreck

• RNA-Seq Bulked Segregant Analysis Enables the Identification of High-Resolution Genetic Markers for Breeding in Hexaploid Wheat Ricardo Ramirez-Gonzalez, Mario Caccamo

• Analysis of Illumina's Nextera Long Mate Pair Data, and Its Effects on Sequence Assembly Bernardo Clavijo, Sarah Ayling, Gonzalo Garcia, Leah Clissold, Meena Anissi , Darren Heavens, Chris Watkins, Federica Di Palma, Sarah Ayling – see scientific poster here

TGAC staff at PAG:

• Bernardo Clavijo, Crop Genomics & Diversity Project Leader
• David Swarbreck, Regulatory & Environmental Genomics Group Leader
• Chris Bennett, Digital Communications Officer
• Christine Fosker, Head of Research Faculty Office
• Ksenia Krasileva, Triticeae Genomics Group Leader
• Luca Venturini, Computational Biologist, Regulatory & Environmental Genomics
• Matt Clark, Plant and Microbial Genomics Group Leader
• Mario Caccamo, Director of TGAC
• Paul Bailey, Scientific Programmer, Crop Genomics & Diversity
• Ricardo Ramirez-Gonzalez, PhD student
• Sarah Ayling, Crop Genomics & Diversity Group Leader
• Sarah Cossey, Director of Operations
• Stuart Catchpole, Head of Business Development & Communications
• Walter Verweij, Senior Research Assistant, Plant & Microbial Genomics